WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 145 - Don't believe half of it…

WeAreDevelopers World Congress 9-11/7/25 - get 15% off using code devdigest

Hello fellow developer, we got into December and this means a lot of advent calendars, like the Advent of Cyber, the Advent of Code and the Web Performance Calendar. As end-of-the-year reports. Spotify Wrapped does not only tell us all what we listened to but also uses Google's NotebookLM to generate a podcast for you. if you are more interested in your year as a developer, check out Unwrapped.

Join us Tuesday, 10/12/2024 online to learn from an amazing group of speakers how AI is redefining web development. Talks by Alejandro Saucedo, Krzysztof Cieśla and Raymond Camden. An expert panel with Angie Jones, Kent C Dodds and more and a fireside chat with Kenneth Auchenberg.

Get a 15% off ticket with the code webdevdigest. 

In AI news, Amazon has a new model family called Nova and Google has a new generative AI video model. Dion Almaer has some interesting principles for AI developer products and devs seem to not gain much from AI coding assistants. Half of LinkedIn's articles are AI generated and if you wonder about bias in AI, ask Copilot to generate a "female salary" function…

In security, the 2024 Open Source Report is an interesting read, Cloudflare reports on the Cyber Week DDoS attempts and it's 'pages.dev' and 'workers.dev' domains are used for phishing. NPM has two very malicious packages and you can turn off the camera light of aThinkPad remotely. Footstep recognition shows how you can identify people by the way they walk.

Some tech bits in brief…

• Deno v. Oracle is a fight about the trademark of JavaScript.
• Amazon has a new Database: Aurora DSQL with some excellent features.
• Umar Hansa shows how View Transitions are SPAs without a framework.
• Gergely Orosz researched which IDEs engineers love and why.
• Memory used by 1M concurrent tasks and 1B nested loop iterations performance.
• Andy Baio collected the best of BlueSky visualisations.

Some tools for you: 

• screen-sharing - share rooms with others - built with Next.js, WebRTC, and PeerJS

• aisuite - a unified interface to multiple Generative AI providers.

• Diff Text - a tool to show differences of two text files.

New Coffee with Developers episode!

Free and open software is a grand thing as explained in the ode to free software. And you can listen to the Matti Nannt how it was to start and evolve an Open Source company.

Procrastination corner and Wonderful Weird Web

• Licence.txt - we really need txt2dragonforce!

• The UX of LEGO Interface Panels - an analysis

• Comball - a mix of 2048 and billiards

Work and Jobs:

Apple illegally spied on employees, Glassdoor released worklife trends for 2025. AI might be responsible for overly tough job interviews, code generators are net-negative devs, and anyone can be an AI engineer with open source models. Hacker News wonders how to grow without learning from seniors and, whilst dreaded, we live in the the age of the PIP.

Some companies to check out are:

KRÜSS - Siedle - syracom - Randstad Digital Germany -  AOK Systems