WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 132 - Binging WADFlix?

Hello fellow developer, watch all the talks of the WeAreDeveloper World Congress, learn prompt engineering and how to sensibly add AI to your apps.

Phase 2 of the WeAreDevelopers Cinematic Universe

Today we are releasing all the videos of the WeAreDevelopers World Congress, 45 days after the event. We'll publish part two of the behind the scenes how we did that Monday on the magazine. Check out all the videos on our Watch section.

Why not get tickets for next year? Save 15% on top with code "devdigest"

News and Articles

Google mothballed the Closure Library and I love it, getting rid of things clogging up the web that aren't needed any longer should be more common. They also increased Chrome bug bounty rewards up to $250k whilst shutting down the Play bug bounty program. Furthermore, they fixed 38 Chrome security issues, so check your in-app browsers that lag behind using old Chromium. Microsoft donates the Mono project to the wine team, so cheers to that.

In the AI space, RE-LAION 5b is a re-release of the huge text-to-image model, this time with more safety features as it did contain illegal CSAM. GenderCARE is a benchmark for assessing gender bias in LLMs whilst dating apps develop AI ‘wingmen’ to generate chat-up lines. AI projects fail twice as much as other IT projects - 80% never get released - and AI is losing hype as the $1 trillion AI bet won't pay off like other tech waves and a paper dives deep into the GenAI hype bubble deflating. Tumblr is moving 500M blogs to WordPress and one of the big winners in the cloud space is Lidl? And, if you want to be a jet setter, but can't afford it, you can bypass airport security via SQL injection. Bobby tables taking off!

Code and Tools

The concept of database “sharding” came from Ultima Online, there are misconceptions about how to optimise LCP, there is good and bad refactoring and a deep-dive into Python's Preprocessor. Terence Eden compares social media site embeds and shows how to replace the Twitter one with Semantic HTML. You can create responsive bar charts in HTML and CSS and, on the weirder side of things, there is a 1 hour per year bug that only shows up in Pacific Time.

Some tools for you:

Tagger - a library to add and remove tags (source)
Chart.js - flexible JS charting library.
Happy DOM a JS browser without UI.
Permify - Open Source fine-grained authorization.
Secure File Sharing Utility - encrypt files on device and share them.

Learning resources

Interactive prompt engineering tutorial by Anthropic.
50 TypeScript F*ck Ups Book - also as ePub/PDF.
Learn Web Components course

Cool code demos

Sticky/Stretching Cursor

Animated 3D Starfield Effect

Talks and Videos

Krzysztof Cieślak shares insights from his work on GitHub Copilot, focusing on the importance of user-centric design, offline evaluation, and telemetry. He also explores different user interfaces for AI applications and advises caution in their implementation. Check out this amazing talk.

Other videos and talk write-ups of note:

Stanislas Girard - Chatbots destroy infrastructures and your cloud bills (21m)
Julian Totzek-Hallhuber - Let’s write an exploit using AI (21m)
Esha Agrawal - Unleashing the power of AI to prevent financial crime (30m)
LaraCon Keynote - Laravel Cloud, Inertia 2.0, Extension, & OSS Updates
Every AI Talk from BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON 2024

Work and Jobs

Should we wonder how close AI is to replacing product managers? When it comes to company communication, it may be good to have a No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and no agenda-less meetings policy. Some people claim that we've been lied to about work and Microsoft states that AI at work Is here. now comes the hard part.

Are you looking for opportunities or fancy a change? How about these?

More jobs here: Remote positions - Germany - Austria

Some companies to check out are:

SMG - VEGA Grieshaber - ING Deutschland - fulfillmenttools - cinemo GmbH

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

What's happening at WeAreDevelopers…

WeAreDevelopers LIVE, our online event series. Next is Java Developer Day. on 11th of September. We are always looking for presenters, apply for LIVE days here

WeAreDevelopers World Congress returns 9-11 July 2025. Tickets are already available at a discount.