SMRTR Programming

Programming stories

Get hand-picked daily summaries of the best, most informative programming articles from around the web. Browse recent summaries, then jump to the original source when you want the full article.

Latest story• Oct 29, 2025

Designing Accessible Dark Mode Interfaces: A Step-by-Step Guide for Modern Web Designers

Modern websites increasingly feature dark mode, but most designs fail basic accessibility standards due to poor contrast and harsh lighting that creates barriers for visually impaired users. This comprehensive tutorial walks developers through building an accessible dark mode interface from scratch, teaching essential principles like using dark gray backgrounds instead of pure black, maintaining 4.5:1 contrast...

Read summary Original source

Latest stories

Make Static Sites Feel Dynamic With APIs Only (No Backend Needed)

Static websites use JavaScript to fetch API data directly in browsers, eliminating backend servers. This approach delivers fast performance and low hosting costs for dynamic content like news feeds and forms.

Read summary Original

Helping Startups Build Faster with an AI Startup Ecosystem

DigitalOcean launched its AI Startup Ecosystem to help AI startups build and scale faster with cloud infrastructure and partner support. The program offers discounted GPU access, credits, and technical support through...

Read summary Original

JetBrains launches open benchmarking platform for measuring AI productivity

JetBrains launched the Developer Productivity AI Arena, an open platform that benchmarks AI coding tools on real-world tasks like bug fixes and code reviews across multiple programming languages.

Read summary Original

I built an actually faster Notion in Rust

A developer left Stripe to build Outcrop, a collaborative wiki faster than Notion using Rust. The platform delivers real-time collaboration with microsecond response times through custom authorization and integrated search.

Read summary Original

concord: A resilient Chord implementation in Go

Concord is a Go library implementing the Chord protocol for resilient distributed hash tables. It handles consistent hashing, automatic node failure recovery, and includes gRPC communication for scalable distributed applications.

Read summary Original

SMRTR Programming

Get the next batch of curated stories in your inbox.

This archive is built from SMRTR newsletter stories. Subscribe for hand-picked stories without the extra noise.

More recent stories

Clean Code Using Smart and Dumb Components in Angular

Angular's smart-dumb component pattern separates components by responsibility to improve code reusability and maintainability. Smart components handle business logic and API calls while dumb components focus solely on UI...

Read summary Original

How We Continually Deliver Software

A development team automated their software delivery process for five Django/Vue web applications using GitHub Actions that handle testing, Docker builds, and deployments to both QA and production environments on Heroku. They...

Read summary Original

Middleware in Rails - FastRuby.io

Rails uses middleware called Rack that sits between web servers and application code, processing HTTP requests and responses before they reach controllers. Rack provides a simple interface that allows each middleware layer to...

Read summary Original

Build Your Own MCP Server with Python and Sevalla

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows AI models to securely connect to external systems, files, and APIs through structured servers. This guide demonstrates building an MCP server using Python and the FastMCP library, creating...

Read summary Original

Building a Layered Defense Against Web Scraping

Web scraping has grown into a $1.03 billion industry projected to nearly double by 2030, with traditional defenses like rate limiting and IP bans proving ineffective against modern scraping tools. Organizations now need a...

Read summary Original

9 Useful Open Source Projects to Simplify Your Life as a Developer ‍️

Nine open-source projects offer developers practical solutions to streamline workflows and boost productivity. These tools include Kilo Code, an AI coding assistant that reached 400,000 downloads in six months and supports over...

Read summary Original

Developing a web server with C and FastCGI

A detailed tutorial demonstrates how to build a web server using C programming language and FastCGI technology, addressing the declining practice of C-based web development. The guide covers setting up Visual Studio Code with...

Read summary Original

Dealing with Impostor Syndrome as a Web Designer or Dev

Most web designers and developers experience impostor syndrome, feeling inadequate despite evidence of their competence, which can damage mental health and career prospects. Key strategies to overcome these self-doubts include...

Read summary Original

Next.js 16: What’s new, and what it means for frontend devs

Next.js 16 focuses on performance improvements and better developer experience rather than flashy new features. The release introduces Cache Components for explicit caching control, Next.js DevTools MCP for AI-assisted debugging,...

Read summary Original

How to Build a Full-Stack AI Agent

Neon has launched Aileen, an open-source AI coding platform that generates complete web applications from simple prompts. The system automatically creates databases, adds authentication, tracks project versions through Git...

Read summary Original

I think the next UX era will shock us: Here are my 3 big predictions

UI/UX design has evolved from complex interfaces to minimalistic designs and continues advancing rapidly. Future trends include hyperminimalism, maximinimalism combining energy with simplicity, and sci-fi inspired futuristic...

Read summary Original

Building From First Principles

Local developers create robust, maintainable applications using "boring" vanilla JavaScript and minimal frameworks, prioritizing first-principles thinking over trendy technology stacks. Their approach focuses on solving actual...

Read summary Original

GitHub's new Agent HQ gives devs a command center for all their AI tools

A third of all developers use Macs, yet GitHub just named their new unified command center "Mission Control" — apparently oblivious to the existing Mac feature. That small oversight aside, the company is launching something...

Read summary Original

From 70K to 2K Tokens: Optimizing SQL Generation with RAG Architecture

A developer tackled the challenge of generating SQL queries for over 100 company database tables by implementing a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architecture using Amazon Bedrock's Claude 3 and Qdrant vector database. The...

Read summary Original

GitHub Code Quality in public preview

GitHub launched Code Quality in public preview, automatically analyzing pull requests for maintainability and reliability issues in six programming languages using CodeQL-based rules. The tool provides one-click Copilot fixes,...

Read summary Original

Most ransomware demands go unpaid now, so attackers have a new strategy

Ransomware success rates dropped to 23% from 85% in 2019 as fewer companies pay demands. Cybercriminals now target large enterprises with data theft tactics instead of just encryption.

Read summary Original

How did the Windows 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

Windows 95's user interface was integrated into Windows NT 4.0 through both teams working closely during development. The window manager features were reimplemented from scratch using Windows 95 code as reference, while Explorer...

Read summary Original

Monte Carlo modeling in Python with probabilit

Probabilit is a Python package for Monte Carlo modeling that simplifies uncertainty calculations in engineering using probability distributions and correlation algorithms. It supports Latin Hypercube sampling and excels at...

Read summary Original

Back to all archives Load more stories