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Articles & Tutorials

Every Caching Strategy Explained in 5 Minutes (5 minute read)

The five common caching strategies software devs must know are Cache-Aside (lazy loading), Read-Through, Write-Through, Write-Behind (write-back), and Write-Around. The choice of strategy depends on the application's specific needs, such as whether it deals with read-heavy workloads, data consistency requirements, or write-heavy loads.

How the Colossus stateful protocol benefits Rapid Storage (7 minute read)

Rapid Storage on Google Cloud overcomes object storage limitations by using Colossus, Google's internal file system, to get sub-millisecond latency. Colossus provides a stateful protocol where clients get handles containing file storage information, allowing for direct data access and low-latency durable appends. Rapid Storage uses gRPC-based streaming with these handles, which lets user authorization be front-loaded, provides subsequent reads/writes directly to Colossus, and has error handling during stream interruptions.

Default styles for h1 elements are changing (4 minute read)

Browsers are removing default styles for `h1` elements nested within sectioning elements like `section`, `article`, `nav`, and `aside`, which previously adjusted the heading size based on nesting depth. Devs need to explicitly define font sizes and margins for `h1` elements to avoid unexpected styling changes and failing Lighthouse audits. Lighthouse will flag `h1` elements without specific font sizes, and browsers like Firefox and Chrome are already implementing or warning about these changes.

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Opinions & Advice

The phony comforts of useful idiots (19 minute read)

AI skepticism often is falsely simplified into two camps: those who believe "AI is fake and sucks" versus those who think "AI is real and dangerous." This dichotomy is useless because it overlooks the nuances of AI's reality, impact, and political economy. Instead, AI is better viewed as a tool for shifting power away from individuals toward centralized structures.

A case against MVPs: Why I've grown to hate "The Lean Startup" (5 minute read)

MVPs are misused and lead to wasteful, unfocused product development. Instead of immediately building MVPs, teams should first validate their target user segment, business model, and potential growth loops. Product teams can avoid building solutions nobody wants by doing the strategic groundwork upfront.

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Launches & Tools

Firebase Studio (Website)

Firebase Studio is a full-stack AI workspace to speed up app development by using AI agents for backend, frontend, and mobile apps. It allows devs to quickly build by importing existing repositories or using AI tools like App Prototyping and Gemini Code Assist. It also has easy deployment to Firebase App Hosting.

Lighthouse Scoring Calculator (Website)

The Lighthouse Scoring Calculator provides a Lighthouse score based on manual inputs, like LCP (Largest Contentful Paint).

Pledge (GitHub Repo)

Pledge is a lightweight, thread-safe reactive programming framework in Swift for simple state management and event propagation using observables and global stores. It has features like thread safety, priority notifications, rate limiting, and functional operators.

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Miscellaneous

So, I Wrote a Book: The Story Behind 100 Go Mistakes (36 minute read)

This developer wrote a book called "100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them." It all started with a blog post that went viral. From there, he got a publishing deal with Manning and had multiple reviews with editing. The book became a success, with translations and recognition within the Go community.

The 2025 AI Index Report (10 minute read)

AI performance continues to improve across benchmarks, adoption is rising in various sectors, and investment is surging, especially in the U.S. While the U.S. leads in model production, China is quickly closing the performance gap, and responsible AI practices are growing unevenly.

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Quick Links

TanStack Router's new feature (1 minute read)

TanStack Router's upcoming `intent` preloading feature will intelligently predict user navigation based on cursor movement to proactively load likely routes before the user interacts with a link.

A surprising enum size optimization in the Rust compiler (6 minute read)

A surprising size optimization in the Rust compiler is for nested enums, where the compiler cleverly reuses the tag space of the inner enum within the outer enum to reduce the overall memory footprint.

.localhost domains (1 minute read)

A method for using custom `.localhost` domains to access locally running web applications is to configure `launchd`, `/etc/hosts`, and Caddy as shown in this post.

Top 5 CSS Navigation Menu Mistakes (10 minute read)

Common UI mistakes in CSS navigation menus include small target areas, improper use of Flexbox gap, unforgiving dropdown target areas, lack of dropdown closing delay, and absence of animated anchor links.

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Thanks for reading,
Priyam Mohanty, Jenny Xu & Ceora Ford

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