#630 – June 15, 2025
AI as first-drafter, pair-programmer, and validator
Field notes from shipping real code with Claude
31 minutes by Diwank Tomer
Diwank brings a comprehensive guide to effective AI-assisted software development that balances productivity with quality. He shares a practical framework for incorporating tools like Claude into professional workflows through three distinct modes: AI as first-drafter, pair-programmer, and validator.
Office migration from Source Depot to Git
11 minutes by Daniel Sada
This article recounts the Daniel's experience leading OneNote's migration from Microsoft's legacy Source Depot version control system to Git. The massive migration involved coordinating thousands of engineers across Office teams, creating a parallel system that synchronized between both repositories, and extensive communication strategies.
The art of SQL query optimization
11 minutes by Jan Nidzwetzki
Jan covers the basic functionality of plan explorer tool which was developed for PostgreSQL. It visualizes how query optimization decisions change across parameter combinations and generates various diagrams showing query plans, expected costs, execution times, and differences between estimated versus actual result tuples.
Falsehoods programmers believe about aviation
5 minutes by Ben Burwell
Ben discusses common misconceptions about aviation data that have caused issues in their flight tracking systems. He outlines numerous false assumptions about flights, airports, airlines, navigation systems, and transponders that engineers might make when designing aviation data systems.
A masochist’s guide to web development
35 minutes by Sebastiano Tronto
In his detailed guide Sebastiano shares his experience converting a complex program to a web application using WebAssembly. He walks through building increasingly complex C libraries that can run in browsers, covering essential techniques like multithreading with pthreads, callback functions between C and JavaScript, and persistent storage using IndexedDB.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: