Stay ahead in web development: latest news, tools, and insights #71

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weeklyfoo #71 is here: your weekly digest of all webdev news you need to know! This time you'll find 36 valuable links in 6 categories! Enjoy!

🚀 Read it!

• I spent five years building a web app, posted it on Hacker News, and got my first $1.: What a ride! by Ryohei Kameyama / startups / 12 min read
• There are a lot of ways to break up long tasks in JavaScript.: It's very common to intentionally break up long, expensive tasks over multiple ticks of the event loop. But there are sure are a lot of approaches to choose from. Let's explore them. by Alex MacArthur / javascript / 13 min read

📰 Good to know

• How Are Images REALLY Stored?: Learning about image formats. by Moncef Abboud / images / 40 min read
• Unexpected Benefits of Building Your Own Tools: Recently I've been thinking a lot about some of the tools I've made, and I have found an insight from game development that I think can apply to the software engineering industry as a whole. by Alex Tiniuc / engineering / 8 min read
• A Little Bit of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback: A short introduction to RLHF and post-training focused on language models. by Nathan Lambert / rlhf / 2 min read
• How I brought LCP down to under 350 ms for Google-referred users on my website: Laying the foundation for super-fast performance with Signed Exchanges (part 1 of 8) by Paweł Pokrywka / performance / 30 min read
• Developer philosophy: Amazing as it may seem after all these years, there are still junior developers in the world. by qntm / engineering / 10 min read
• Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry: Things changed, picked up and not changed. by Chris Kiehl / engineering / 3 min read
• Cross-platform mobile development with Expo: Expo has quietly become one of the most popular tools for cross-platform development. Why is this, and how does Expo work? A deepdive with the Expo engineering team by Gergely Orosz, Elin Nilsson / expo / 16 min read
• Beej's Guide to Git: Learn git by Brian Hall / git / 1 min read
• It’s OK to hardcode feature flags: I'd mostly agree with this article but there are some features that come with SaaS providers that static feature flags are not able to. by mendhak / featureflags / 3 min read
• How I learned to code with my voice: Struggling with severe hand pain, I learned to code by voice. by Salma Alam-Naylor / engineering, voice / 15 min read
• How to Favicon in 2025: Three files that fit most needs by Andrey Sitnik / favicons / 17 min read
• Ingesting Millions of PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 Changes Everything: Chunking PDFs—converting them into neat, machine-readable text chunks—is a major headache for any RAG systems. Both open-source and proprietary solutions exist, but none have truly achieved the ideal combination of accuracy, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. by Sergey Filimonov / ai, gemini / 1 min read
• The End of Programming as We Know It: There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it. by Tim O’Reilly / ai, engineering / 25 min read
• On Product-Market Fit: PmF is when customers sell your product for you. by David Cramer / pmf, startups / 10 min read
• Which rich text editor framework should you choose in 2025?: Looking to integrate a WYSIWYG editor into your JavaScript app? This comparison dives into the best frameworks available, including Tiptap, Lexical, BlockNote, and Slate. by Aurélien Dupays Dexemple, Jonathan Rowny / editors / 22 min read
• GitHub Copilot: The agent awakens: Introducing agent mode for GitHub Copilot in VS Code, announcing the general availability of Copilot Edits, and providing a first look at our SWE agent. by Thomas Dohmke / github, copilot / 18 min read

🧰 Tools

• Lume: A lightweight CLI and local API server to create, run and manage macOS and Linux virtual machines (VMs) natively on Apple Silicon. by Cua / virtualization
• Earthstar: A database for private, distributed, offline-first applications. Earthstar is a specification and JavaScript library for building connected applications owned and run by their users. by earthstar-project.org / databases
• pydantic.run: Python browser sandbox. by pydantic.run / python, sandbox
• Publican: Publican is a simple HTML-first static site generator for Node.js by Craig Buckler / ssg
• parse-duration: convert a human readable duration to ms by Jake Rosoman / javascript, tools
• Feluda: Detect license usage restrictions in your project! by Ani / licenses
• HTTP Status codes for Node.js: Utility to interact with HTTP status code in Node.js by adaltas / status-codes
• React QR Scanner: A library to scan QR Codes in react. by Yudiel Curbelo / qr, react
• tinygradient: simple gradient generator by Damien Sorel / gradients, colors
• monoco: Monoco is a tiny JavaScript library that adds squircles (smooth corners) and other corner types to html elements. by Wimer Hazenberg / shapes, html, javascript
• diagram.page: a simple & intuitive flowchart builder experience. by internet.dev / diagrams
• Lightpanda: the headless browser designed for AI and automation by lightpanda.io / browsers
• DB Fiddle: SQL Database Playground by db-fiddle.com / databases

🎨 Design

• Tooltips are presentational: The ARIA tooltip role is functionally useless and semantically meaningless. The only legitimate use-case for tooltips is to show information that’s already accessibly defined. So tooltips only benefit sighted users, and are therefore presentational. by James Edwards / aria, tooltips / 13 min read

📚 Tutorials

• Vite with TypeScript: A brief walkthrough on how to upgrade Vite from JavaScript to TypeScript. by Robin Wieruch / vite, typescript / 4 min read
• Building a progress-indicating scroll-to-top button in HTML and CSS: What a nice effect just with some css! by Manuel Matuzović / css / 5 min read
• Creating an Angled Slider: Let’s walk through how this slider with angled content and hover effect works. by Zach Saucier / css, slider / 12 min read

📺 Videos

• Angular: The Documentary - An origin story: All the Honeypot productions are so enjoyable. Also watch it if you don't care about Angular. by Honeypot / angular, honeypot

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