dev.to top (week)

14 hours ago

TL;DR Understand what Cowork is and how it extends Claude Code’s agentic capabilities to non-coding, knowledge-based work. Learn how Cowork differs from standard chat-based AI interactions and why file access changes the workflow. Get a high-level view of Cowork’s execution model, safety boundari

Bifrost: The Fastest LLM Gateway for Production-Ready AI Systems (40x Faster Than LiteLLM)

21 hours ago

If you’ve ever scaled an LLM-powered application beyond a demo, you’ve probably felt it. Everything works beautifully at first. Clean APIs. Quick experiments. Fast iterations. Then traffic grows. At some point, the LLM gateway, the very thing meant to simplify your stack, quietly becomes your bigges

Your GitHub Contribution Graph Means Absolutely Nothing - And Here’s Why

a day ago

If your GitHub contribution graph disappeared tomorrow, would that make you a worse developer? For years, we’ve been trained — consciously or not — to treat green squares as a proxy for competence, discipline, or even passion. TL;DR: A GitHub contribution graph measures neither productivity, nor ski

Moving on from Terraform CDK

a day ago

HashiCorp is sunsetting Terraform CDK. Terraform CDK let you write infrastructure in TypeScript instead of HCL - you'd define AWS resources in TypeScript, run cdktf synth to generate Terraform JSON, then terraform apply to provision everything. Writing infrastructure in a real programming language w

Stop Overengineering: How to Write Clean Code That Actually Ships 🚀

4 days ago

I've spent the better part of a decade writing code that I thought was brilliant, only to realize six months later that it was a monument to my own insecurity. You know the type—the kind of codebase where you need a PhD to understand why a simple feature takes three layers of abstraction, two design

I Replaced Redis with PostgreSQL (And It's Faster)

I had a typical web app stack: PostgreSQL for persistent data Redis for caching, pub/sub, and background jobs Two databases. Two things to manage. Two points of failure. Then I realized: PostgreSQL can do everything Redis does. I ripped out Redis entirely. Here's what happened. Before the change, Re

Tech Stack Lessons from scaling 20x in a year

A year ago, I wrote about our tech stack and how it helped us run a lean cloud computing startup. Since then, we've scaled over 20x. That kind of growth is fun, but also breaks a lot of things and assumptions; and forces you to make hard choices, quickly :D Here's what changed, what stayed the same,

The First Week at a Startup Taught Me More Than I Expected

Since many of you seemed interested in reading more about this, here’s my first-week reflection. My first week at a startup felt less like starting a job and more like stepping into motion that was already happening. There wasn’t a clean boundary around my role. Some days I was coding, some days deb

What was your win this week???

👋👋👋👋 Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of? All wins count -- big or small 🎉 Examples of 'wins' include: Getting a promotion! Starting a new project Fixing a tricky bug Beating a level in a game you've been stuck on 🎮 Happy Friday!

Prompt Engineering Won’t Fix Your Architecture

Every few years, our industry rediscovers an old truth and pretends it’s new. Clean code. Suddenly, people who shipped a single CRUD app in 2019 are tweeting things like: “The problem isn’t your system. It’s your prompts.” Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode No. Pro

When is a side project worth committing to?

I’m in a different mindset these days. For years, I—like many developers—fell into the trap of starting projects that were technically impressive but practically draining. I don’t have the time or energy anymore to commit to the ongoing process of building something that could eventually be useful.

CSS Grid + Flexbox Mastery: Build Responsive UIs Faster

I've been building interfaces for the web for over a decade now, and I can tell you without hesitation that mastering CSS Grid and Flexbox changed everything about how I approach layout work. Not in some abstract, theoretical way—I mean it fundamentally shifted how fast I ship features, how maintain

How to Crack Any Software Developer Interview in 2026 (Updated for AI & Modern Hiring)

The software developer interview preparation in 2026 is in a constant state of evolution. What worked just a few years ago (or even in 2025) might not be enough to land you your dream job in 2026. The landscape has shifted, with new technologies, methodologies, and expectations emerging. If you’re

Optimizing JSON for LLMs

If you're building AI-powered features, you're probably sending a lot of JSON to language models. And if you're sending a lot of JSON, you're probably burning through tokens faster than you'd like. At Kollabe, we use AI to generate summaries, action items, and suggestions for retrospectives and stan

Join the Algolia Agent Studio Challenge: $3,000 in Prizes!

We're thrilled to announce our newest challenge with Algolia! Running through February 8, the Algolia Agent Studio Challenge invites you to build intelligent, data-driven AI agents using Algolia's Agent Studio and search infrastructure. Whether you're crafting conversational shopping assistants, bui

I Didn’t “Become” a Senior Developer. I Accumulated Damage.

There’s a strange myth in tech that one day you wake up and—boom—you’re a senior developer. You get the title. That’s not how it actually happens. What really happens is much less glamorous. I thought being a good developer meant knowing more things. If a problem existed, surely the solution was: an

I Built a Game Engine from Scratch in C++ (Here's What I Learned)

I Built a Game Engine from Scratch in C++ (Here's What I Learned) I crashed my GPU 47 times before I saw my first triangle on screen. For 3 months, I built a game engine from scratch in C++ using DirectX 9 and Win32—no Unity, no Unreal, no middleware. Just me, the Windows API, and a lot of segment

TensorFlow with Azure ML: An Architectural Guide to Pre-Trained Models

Most machine learning systems fail long before model quality becomes a problem. They fail due to cost overruns, environment drift, unclear ownership, or the inability to move beyond experimentation. The model itself is rarely the bottleneck. This article takes an architectural view on running Tensor

I Am 38, I Am a Nurse, and I Have Always Wanted to Learn Coding

I am a nurse. I am 38 years old. And I have not started coding yet. But I have always wanted to. That want has followed me quietly for years. It shows up when I hear people talk about building things from nothing, when I see software solving real problems, and when I wonder what is actually happen

Bifrost: The fastest way to build AI applications that never go down

8 days ago

LLM applications are rapidly becoming a critical part of production today. But behind the scenes, it's almost always the same thing, namely dozens of providers, different SDKs, keys, limits, backups, and more. One failure from the provider means that the entire AI layer is falling. A concrete exampl

🎀 The 80/20 Rule of Learning Programming

8 days ago

You're going to waste years of your life learning to code if nobody tells you the truth. Not because you're not smart enough. Not because programming is impossibly hard. But because you're going to spend most of your time learning things that don't matter, building skills nobody needs, and following

JavaScript Frameworks - Heading into 2026

I suppose after three years, we can consider my review of JavaScript Frameworks an annual event now. For 2025, I had a hard time writing the article because there was a sobering reality that many of the ideas we tried wouldn’t get us all the way to the finish line. But sometimes we all need a realit

I built an app in every frontend framework

TL;DR Which framework should you use? Well, that depends on what you're developing and your prioritie are. But I made a quick comparison tool to help you find the perfect stack for your project. See: Stack Match. Just want the numbers? I also built the same app using 10 different frameworks, and b

An Instagram Automation Tool That Turns Engagement into Sales

This is a submission for the DEV's Worldwide Show and Tell Challenge Presented by Mux I built Pilot, an Instagram automation and deal management platform for creators, founders, and small teams who sell through Instagram. Pilot turns comments and DMs into a structured sales workflow. Instead of manu

I Built a Zero-Miss Cancer Screening Model Using Routine Blood Tests