How programmers spend their time

How programmers spend their time
10 minutes by Malte Skarupke

A tiny bug fix took over 10 hours due to everything around the actual code change. Most time went to fighting build systems, dependency conflicts, sandboxes blocking debugging tools, and repeatedly running the wrong version of the code. The fix itself was ten seconds of typing. The real work was finding the right file to type it in.

Auth Isn't Your Core Product. Stop Engineering It Like It Is.
sponsored by FusionAuth

You didn't get hired to debug password reset flows. Yet homegrown auth quietly consumes entire sprints — security patches, compliance audits, MFA edge cases, OAuth upgrades. Use FusionAuth's Build vs Buy assessment to make the case to your team. Self-hosted or cloud, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified, with SDKs for every major framework. Free to download.

Death of software? Nah.
13 minutes by Steven Sinofsky

Past tech shifts like the PC, online retail, and streaming took far longer than predicted, yet created more output than anyone imagined, not less. AI will follow the same pattern. There will be more software, more complexity, and more domain expertise needed, not less. Some companies will fail, but the overall market will grow enormously.

Postgres locks explained
20 minutes by Brian

Unlike spreadsheets such as Excel, where usually only one person works at a time, a large Postgres server can orchestrate hundreds to thousands of active queries simultaneously. But this creates a problem: what if two users commission operations that are incompatible with each other?

How Michael Abrash doubled Quake framerate
19 minutes by Fabien Sandglard

Quake's hand-written assembly code was confirmed to nearly double its framerate, from 22.7 to 42.2 fps on a Pentium MMX 233MHz. Most of the gain came from three drawing routines: world surface rendering, lightmap baking, and model drawing. The key tricks were running floating-point divisions in parallel with integer pixel drawing, self-modifying code to free up registers, loop unrolling, and using unsigned comparisons to replace two branches with one.

How to make architecture decisions
11 minutes by Lukas Niessen

Good architecture decisions need the right process. Write an RFC that lays out the problem, options, and ranked priorities, then let people review it async before meeting to decide. Once decided, document it in a short ADR the same day. Ranking priorities matters more than listing pros and cons, because it forces real trade-offs into the open and stops loud voices from winning by default.

📱 Switch to SuperMobile from T-Mobile. Get iPhone 17 Pro for free*
sponsored by T-Mobile

SuperMobile gives your business what it needs: unlimited premium data on America’s largest 5G network, intelligent network performance, and a 5-year price guarantee.** Plus if you switch to SuperMobile right now, you can get a free iPhone 17 Pro (with a qualifying plan) to run your business. The best business plan on the best network. Get started.

*With 24 monthly bill credits when you add a line and trade-in an eligible device on SuperMobile. For well-qualified customers; plus tax & $35 device connection charge. 
**Exclusions like taxes & fees apply.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• My AI adoption journey