Programming

If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey…

Bringing Private Processing to Meta AI Glasses

We believe glasses are the best form factor for having AI help throughout your day. They can understand your personal context better than other kinds of devices and keep you present without picking up a mobile phone.  Mo…

GitLab Critical Patch Release: 19.4.1, 19.3.3, 19.2.7

How to design GitLab for enterprise scale

At enterprise scale, even small architecture choices can have outsized consequences. A deployment that works for a handful of teams can become a constraint once thousands of developers, repositories, and pipelines depend…

How GitLab reduced code-per-agentic-flow ratio by 45%

GitLab Duo Agent Platform orchestrates and automates complex tasks through agentic flows. A key part of the platform is the Flow Registry, a declarative configuration framework, built from reusable components, that compi…

Open-Sourcing Rebalancer: A Generic, High-Performance Library for Solving Assignment Problems

We’re open-sourcing Rebalancer, the assignment-problem solver that has been used to solve resource allocation problems throughout Meta for over nine years. Rebalancer separates several related concerns: how to specify an…

Inside Petal: Building the World’s First Petabit-Class Transoceanic Subsea Cable

Petal, the next step in Meta’s subsea innovation, will be the first subsea cable to deliver petabit capacity at transoceanic distances, connecting France and the United States over approximately 7,000 km (4,300 mi). Expe…

Securing the software factory at machine speed

I joined GitLab at a moment when the way teams build and secure software has been changing rapidly. GitLab CEO Bill Staples recently framed that shift in When Code Is Abundant. When code is no longer the bottleneck, trus…

GitLab 19.4 released

Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing

GitLab.com hosts millions of projects for teams of every size that need a platform they can rely on. Demand is climbing quickly, and we expect platform load to grow several times over this year. Predictable limits are wh…

ZGateway: Learnings from Putting a Proxy in Front of ZippyDB

We’re introducing ZGateway, the proxy we are using to unify traffic through ZippyDB, Meta’s most widely-used key value store. As a bonus, it also enables admission control, load balancing, cross-region resilience, and ri…

An Organizational Second Brain: Building an AI That Learns From Experts

We’ve built an AI agent that acts as a secondary expert for a given domain, making deep specialist knowledge readily available and preserved for anyone in an organization to access, share, and build upon. This is not a t…

You Can't "Vibe Code" Love

About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the rig…

MetaRoCE: A New RDMA Transport Built for AI-Scale Ethernet

Training and serving frontier AI models depends on fast, reliable networks that move data between GPUs without wasting compute cycles.  To meet this challenge at scale, Meta designed MetaRoCE – a clean-sheet RDMA transpo…

Kafka App? There’s a Skill for That

Etsy is home to over 100 million listings from 5.6 million active sellers. Because the items for sale are unique and creative, there is no standard product catalog that tells us what they are. When someone searches for “…

Shipyard: How We Built Slack’s Next-Generation EC2 Platform

Over the past few years, we’ve been on a journey to modernise how we run Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances at Slack. In our first post, Advancing Our Chef Infrastructure, we shared how we moved from a single C…

Every Choice Changes Everything: The Show

About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network. Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow, but we quick…

Agentic Testing: Where Agents Fit in the E2E Testing Stack

Abstract Agent-driven end-to-end (E2E) tests add a new exploratory layer to testing, but should they replace traditional deterministic tests? We ran more than 200 agentic E2E workflows using the Playwright MCP, Playwrigh…

Machine Text Detectors are Membership Inference Attacks

Differentially Private Table-Image Multimodal Data Generation

Atomic Facts to Structured Knowledge: Rethinking Unlearning & Jailbreaking in Large Language Models

Understanding Trade-offs Between Worst-case Differential Privacy Guarantees & Real Threat Models

Local Node Differential Privacy

Privacy Amplification for Correlated-Noise Mechanisms via b-Min-Sep Subsampling

Slack AI: The Path to Multi-Cloud

In early 2023, Slack faced a foundational challenge: serving Large Language Models (LLMs) at enterprise scale with the security, reliability, and performance our customers expect. Over three years, we evolved from basic …

Shaping Product Understanding with Contrastive Reinforcement Learning

Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weav…

From SSH to REST: A Security-Driven Modernization of Slack’s EMR Data Pipelines

Excerpt By 2024, Slack’s data platform had accumulated 700+ SSH-based operators orchestrating critical data pipelines. We’re talking daily search indexing that processed terabytes of data, analytics jobs powering busines…

Thank You For Being a Friend

It's been one of those months, and by that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post, because I only have two things to say. First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the GMI (Guaranteed

Managing context in long-run agentic applications

Excerpt In complex, long-running agentic systems, maintaining alignment and coherent reasoning between agents requires careful design. In this second article of our series, we explore these challenges and the mechanisms …

From Custom to Open: Scalable Network Probing and HTTP/3 Readiness with Prometheus

The Problem: Legacy Tooling and Its Limitations Currently, Slack utilizes a hybrid approach to network measurement, incorporating both internal (such as traffic between AWS Availability Zones) and external (monitoring tr…

Making Ads Count: Using MMoE and Auxiliary Tasks to Better Connect Buyers & Sellers

When buyers search on Etsy, they need to quickly and easily find the perfect item. At the same time, sellers need to be confident their unique products are being seen by the right customers. Our Ads Search ranking model,…

Migrating Etsy’s database sharding to Vitess

Etsy has maintained a sharded MySQL architecture since around 2010. This database cluster contains most of Etsy’s online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards. Over the last 16 years, it h…

Launching The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative

It's been a year since I invited Americans to join us in a pledge to Share the American Dream: 1. Support organizations you feel are effectively helping those most in need across America right now. 2. Within the next fiv…

How Etsy Uses LLMs to Improve Search Relevance

Ever searched for something specific, only to be met with results that are close, but not quite? On Etsy’s Search Relevance team, that frustration is exactly what we are tackling. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: to hel…

Reducing experiment duration with predicted control variates

In 2021, we published a blog post titled “Increasing experimentation accuracy and speed by using control variates,” describing how we reduce the variance of metrics using CUPED in our experimentation platform. This is a …

The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income

The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.

FLOSS Weekly: FLOSS Weekly Continues at Hackaday - Hackaday is the new home of FLOSS Weekly

FLOSS Weekly continues with Jonathan Bennett at its new home at Hackaday. Host: Jonathan Bennett Visit hackaday.com/floss or search your favorite podcatcher to subscribe.

FLOSS Weekly 761: We Won! - The Victories of Free Software and Open Source

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Dan Lynch, Simon Phipps, and Leo Laporte gather to celebrate the final victory of free software and open source—and the final FLOSS Weekly as well. Hosts: Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman,…

FLOSS Weekly 760: Making Money In Open Source - Adam Jacob, Chef & System Initiative

Adam Jacob talks with Doc Searls and Shawn Powers about making money in open source, based on his long experience with Chef, System Initiative, and other development communities that are also businesses. Hosts: Doc Sea…

FLOSS Weekly 759: ActivityPub Crawl - Evan Prodromou on ActivityPub & OpenEarth

Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett go deep into what's happening in the fediverse with Evan Prodromou, the co-creator of ActivityPub, the open protocol behind Mastodon and other truly social networks on the Internet. Host…

FLOSS Weekly 758: Raiders of the Lost Source - Rocky and Oracle Unbreakable Linux, OpenAI Shakeup

Doc Searls and Dan Lynch explore long-standing ethical and technical imperatives of the free software and open source movements, and the wild new challenges they face in an age of AI that is still just beginning. Hosts…

Let a thousand programming publications bloom.

Calling AWS Bedrock from code

Using Python in a Jupyter notebook Continue reading on Better Programming »

Pandas v Psycopg:

A Postgres database speed test. Who wins? Continue reading on Better Programming »

Automating Your DevOps: Writing Scripts that Save Time and Headaches

Or, how scripting revolutionized my workflow Continue reading on Better Programming »

Integrating Psychology into Software Development

Emotional Architecture in Software Design Continue reading on Better Programming »

GPT Function Calling: 5 Underrated Use Cases

FLOSS Weekly 757: Noodling Around with OpenZiti - Philip Griffiths, OpenZiti and Secure Networking

Philip Griffiths of OpenZiti explains to Doc Searls, Shawn Powers, and Jonathan Bennett how OpenZiti is on its way to becoming the Linux of secure networking. An overview of OpenZiti and how it implements zero trust pr…

Remove Paywalls from Search Results

NBA Bubbleball and NBA Revenue [Podcast with Washington Post]

Meet Tech Experts

Four Coding Stories

Three Coding Stories

Four Tech Stories

Turn your REST APIs into MCP tools with Google Cloud API Gateway

Google Cloud API Gateway now acts as a native remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, eliminating the need to build and maintain custom middleware to expose REST APIs to AI agents. By simply adding specific annotatio…

Reproducing OLMo 3 7B Pre-training in MaxText: case study of large scale training on TPUs

The MaxText team successfully reproduced AI2’s OLMo 3 7B language model from scratch on Google Cloud TPUs using JAX/XLA, precisely matching the original PyTorch-on-GPU reference across pre-training and mid-training stage…

Introducing Support for Local AI Models in the Antigravity SDK

The Google Antigravity SDK now empowers developers to execute offline, agentic workflows locally using models like Gemma 4 26B A4B via LiteRT. This update facilitates powerful hybrid orchestration architectures, allowing…

Colab is now part of your Google AI plan

Unlock premium Google Colab compute with Google AI. Subscribers now get priority accelerators, Premium GPUs, and background execution for long training runs.

Why client SDK generation belongs in the open

Google has partnered with Speakeasy to open-source their OpenAPI code generation suite under the AGPLv3 license, a strategic move prompted by the sudden shutdown of Google's previous proprietary SDK provider. The newly o…

Agent Anomaly Detection, now in Private Preview on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

Agent Anomaly Detection is a new, out-of-band oversight layer for the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform that analyzes OpenTelemetry traces and tool calls to catch behavioral risks without adding runtime latency to live re…