A developer that became a full-time writer, here on dev.to!

When a clinician’s ideology about a medication overrides the observable evidence of your functioning, the tool has stopped serving the human. The human is now serving the tool.

The pattern across all of this is the same pattern I spent my software career fighting. The system is optimized for its own internals: diagnostic categories, billing codes, school-of-thought loyalties, liability management, practitioner comfort. The human is expected to adapt to the system. A patient must learn the system’s language, absorb its labels as identity, accept its theological disputes being fought across their body chemistry, and survive its gatekeeping, all while sick. That is exactly backwards, and it is backwards in the precise way urllib2 was backwards: the machinery’s convenience placed upstream of the human’s need.

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2026/07/31/links-for-july-2026/

Rust ISN’T like any other language. In Rust, it’s EASY to write code that never crashes. So why DON’T people do that?!

Very good question.

A small C64 demo released at X 2026.

Very impressive!

I love formalisms. My research is all about constructing new formal representations of ideas using programming languages techniques (and right now those ideas happen to be in data visualization).

I remember when Emery Berger explained that Excel bugs bubbled up to misguided economic policies. (Until recently) I’ve tried to avoid Jupyter notebooks as much as possible. I hate chasing down NaNs in plain JS code.

Yet the popularity of these tools is hard to ignore. Excel is arguably the most popular programming language (again, thanks to Emery Berger’s talk for this). Jupyter notebooks are many scientists’ day-to-day programming interfaces. And JavaScript still rules the web.

Discusses an influential paper of the same name. Definitely much to think about here; feeling much synergy with The Score.

see: https://link.springer.com/journal/10606

Tail-recursive code in JavaScript still risks stack overflow in real-world runtimes. Learn when recursion is safe and when to switch to iterative patterns.

The trampoline pattern is really cool. And I am only lightly upset that ECMAScript runtimes don’t implement tail call optimization as specified. :’)

At every large tech company, some engineers get rewarded for visibly breaking the rules. This can be really frustrating for a certain kind of software engineer for whom rule-following is important. In fact, rule-breaking is systematically rewarded at large tech companies, and for good reason. But it’s a sharp tool — how and when you break a rule matters a lot. Strong engineers break rules deliberately, carefully, and in ways that protect their managers.

via: https://www.seangoedecke.com/seeing-like-a-software-company/

The idea of a C-set was introduced in an earlier post. In this post, we explain how C-sets are implemented as a data structure in the Julia programming language.

see: https://blog.algebraicjulia.org/post/2020/09/cset-graphs-1/

We hypothesized that if the threshold were raised, e.g. to 0.7 or 0.8, the model would reduce false positives by only returning articles it was very confident about. Our experiments confirmed this, but also showed a tradeoff: a stricter threshold means missing some truly relevant articles.

When we presented this tradeoff to the Pregnancy Justice team, they offered a surprising insight: they wanted the false positives. They explained that reviewing even the false positive articles, those not directly about pregnancy criminalization, was actually valuable. These articles helped them understand the broader landscape: adjacent policy discussions, related criminal justice issues, and the wider context in which pregnancy criminalization occurs. What we labeled as irrelevant from a technical standpoint was often relevant from a strategic advocacy standpoint.

Filtering is hard!

And how to build things the right way.

In his first week at SingleTrac, a video game company that made cult classics like Twisted Metal, Jay Barnson discovered the “black triangle” – a way of describing problems that are giant in engineering scope but don’t tend to be all that impressive to anyone else.

via: https://github.com/coln-project/Coln

Avid programmer that loves to push the limits of JavaScript

Dead blog of a good colleague.

I would have kept my identity separate from my projects. Requests is a library. I am a person. The conflation of the two was the root cause of most of the damage. When the project is you, every issue is personal, every critique is existential, and every success is addictive in exactly the wrong way. I’d build the thing, release the thing, and then go home and be a person who also built a thing. Not a person who IS the thing.

As an avid user of Requests for over six years, I had no idea that the author was basically running on empty for a decade due to bipolar disorder. I wish the system—both open source and education—hadn’t chewed him up and spar him out like it did. Watch yourself.

Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel, pre-atomic steel, or pre-nuclear steel, is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. Typically obtained from scrapped ships, salvaged shipwrecks, and other steel artifacts of this era, it is often used as a shielding material for particle detectors and whole-body counting equipment because more modern steel is contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout. Other low-background materials, such as ancient lead, are sometimes used for especially sensitive equipment.

You probably know one hundred people. Picture two of them staring at a broken screen. The 98% statistic is a lazy shortcut. Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases. If a fancy new feature can’t degrade gracefully, then 98% isn’t “widely supported”. It failed to meet the basic minimum for 2% of the people out there.

via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816959

Gigantic archive about physical properties of many materials.

LLMs don’t code well in actually challenging coding projects and lack agency. Tools are unproductive.

How Rust prevents data races, and how languages like it could influence future code generation.

As the title says, and a good reference for those new to the industry.

A deep dive into Claude Code for daily users. Covers the .claude directory, CLAUDE.md the way Boris writes it, CLAUDE.local.md, Skills with real examples, custom subagents, plugins, underused commands like /goal and /insights, MCPs, and the workflow patterns the Anthropic team actually uses.