Programming vehicles in games

Programming vehicles in games
9 minutes by Wassim Alhajomar

Wassim describes fundamental principles for implementing vehicle physics in games, showing that the focus should be on creating the desired experience rather than perfect physical simulation. He explains a three-component conceptual model consisting of: the engine/gearbox, wheels/tires, and the chassis.

FusionAuth. Auth, Built for Devs, by Devs.
sponsored by FusionAuth

FusionAuth is the modern authentication platform that simplifies secure user access for your applications. It provides user registration, login flows with social and multi-factor auth, OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect support, and robust user data management. With scalable architecture and extensive APIs/SDKs, FusionAuth offloads complex authentication logic so you can focus on getting back to building the apps you love.

LLM embeddings explained
15 minutes by Hesam Sheikh Hassani

Embeddings are the semantic backbone of LLMs, the gate at which raw text is transformed into vectors of numbers that are understandable by the model. Hesam goes through the fundamentals of embeddings. He covers what embeddings are, how they evolved over time from statistical methods to modern techniques, checks out how they're implemented in practice, looks at some of the most important embedding techniques, and how the embeddings of an LLM look like as a graph representation. He also includes interactive visualization and hands-on code examples.

Learning about GPUs through measuring memory bandwidth
9 minutes by Manon Oomen

Manon investigates GPU performance using microbenchmarks to gain insights into hardware behavior, particularly focusing on memory bandwidth. She explains how GPUs access memory through descriptors rather than direct pointers, details different buffer types, and describes how texture units handle complex data operations. Manon also covers the memory hierarchy with multiple cache levels and strategies for managing memory writes and latency.

Making Postgres 42,000x slower
13 minutes by Jacob Jackson

Jacob explores how to intentionally make Postgres extremely slow using only postgresql.conf configuration changes. Starting with a baseline of 7,082 TPS, he systematically degraded performance by minimizing cache size, forcing excessive autovacuum operations, manipulating WAL settings to increase disk writes, effectively disabling indexes by adjusting cost parameters, and finally limiting I/O to a single worker thread. Jacob's final configuration achieved less than 0.1 TPS—over 42,000 times slower than baseline.

How to write a good design document
6 minutes by Grant Slatton

Grant outlines key principles for effective technical documentation. He defines design documents as technical reports that justify implementation strategies, emphasizing that the primary goal is to convince readers that the design is optimal. He highlights the importance of logical organization, anticipating reader objections, ruthless editing for brevity, and practicing regularly to develop strong documentation skills.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025