PD#701 Why I am a programmer

Why I am a programmer
5 minutes by Alfie John

Growing up before the internet, a kid discovers the underground world of BBSs, pirated games, and the mesmerizing digital art that played before them, called demos. Stumbling onto a tutorial series about how to create these effects sparks a deep desire to go from spectator to creator. It is a story about how exposure to something mind blowing at a young age can set the course of a life.

Vector search can't tell which memory is current
sponsored by Oracle

When user preferences change, a flat memory store keeps both versions, and ranking alone doesn’t say which one is current. Using graph retrieval, link the new memory to the one it replaced and mark the old one as history instead of deleting it. The agent gives the right answer and can still explain what changed. See the code & companion notebook.

Getting good at AI takes time and practice
3 minutes by Sean Goedecke

It shouldn’t be surprising that working with AI involves actual skills. It’s like working with a really weird person: a savant with mad skills in some areas and huge gaps in others, a prolific but inexpert communicator, a workaholic with no long-term memory, and so on. If you were a manager and had someone like that as your employee, you could likely get a lot of value out of them, but it would take time to figure out how.

The compiler was supposed to end programming too
14 minutes by Hatim Rih

AI tools are changing software development fast, but not ending it. Agents now handle routine coding tasks overnight, yet they still stop when a decision requires human judgment. Adoption is high but satisfaction is mixed, and teams are drowning in code faster than they can review it. The hardest parts of the job, deciding what to build and verifying it works correctly, remain stubbornly human.

Backups aren't simple
10 minutes by Aleksandar Filipovski

Data loss is more common than most people expect, and simple backups are not enough. A good backup system needs multiple copies across different storage types, with one kept offsite. It also needs point-in-time snapshots so you can recover from mistakes, not just hardware failure. Rather than building this yourself, mature tools like Borg or Restic handle the hard parts, but you must regularly test restoring your data or none of it matters.

Node at scale, rebalanced: How Booking cut cost by 38%
19 minutes by Ilya Malyavin

Switching from pm2 to wattpm for process management, combined with smarter nginx load balancing and tuned garbage collection settings, cut compute costs by 38% on Booking's largest Node service. The team ran 30% fewer pods, reduced memory use by 20%, and cut tail latency by up to 10%. No application code changes were needed, and other teams could adopt the improvement by changing a single config flag.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• I'm sorry, but you still have to think

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