~betterdevlink | Issues #277 Mar 25, 2025 (25)

When You Deleted /lib on Linux While Still Connected via SSH A classic tale of Linux horror. You’re SSH’d into a machine, you make one wrong move, and suddenly your system is broken. This post walks through how to recover from this self-inflicted nightmare.

Think About SQL MERGE in Terms of a RIGHT JOIN RIGHT JOIN is an esoteric feature in the SQL language, and hardly ever seen in the real world, because almost every RIGHT JOIN can just be expressed as an equivalent LEFT JOIN. There is, however, one place in the SQL language where RIGHT JOIN is surprisingly ubiquitous and today we learn about it.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs An approachable introduction to the magic of zero-knowledge proofs—how they let you prove something without revealing the details. Perfect for anyone curious about cryptography without diving into hardcore math.

Understanding Solar Energy This one’s a bit outside the usual programming realm, but trust me—it’s fascinating. A deep dive into how solar panels actually work, the engineering behind them, and why understanding electricity at this level is surprisingly useful.

A Synchronization Engine for Everyone Syncing data is one of those things that sounds easy until you try to build it. This post walks through a synchronization engine design that’s both simple and powerful.

Leaking Passwords (and more!) on macOS A deep dive into how macOS can unintentionally leak sensitive data like passwords, thanks to clipboard behavior and debugging tools. A must-read for anyone who cares about security.

A Deep Dive into the Inline Background Overlap Problem Ever tried putting text over an image and ended up with weird background overlaps? This post explains why that happens and how to fix it. If you do anything with CSS, you’ll want to bookmark this one.

BPF: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Kernel BPF is like a superpower for peeking into Linux. Whether you care about performance monitoring, security, or just love cool system hacks, this is a fantastic read.

A History of Null Pointer Dereferences on macOS A nostalgic yet technical look at how null pointer dereferences have plagued macOS over the years. Great for those who love debugging deep OS issues.

Improving Recommendation Systems & Search in the Age of LLMs AI-powered recommendations are everywhere, but how do they really work? This post explores how LLMs are changing search and recommendation engines for the better.

Ruby Ractors and Lock-Free Data Structures If you’re a Rubyist curious about parallelism, this is for you. A practical look at Ruby’s Ractors and how they enable truly parallel execution without locks.

konva an HTML5 Canvas JavaScript framework that extends the 2d context by enabling canvas interactivity for desktop and mobile applications.

Physix-go A physics engine in Go that makes simulating motion, collisions, and forces as simple as possible.

playwright-mcp A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides browser automation capabilities using Playwright. This server enables LLMs to interact with web pages through structured accessibility snapshots, bypassing the need for screenshots or visually-tuned models.

xata agent an open source agent that monitors your database, finds root causes of issues, and suggests fixes and improvements. It’s like having a new SRE hire in your team, one with extensive experience in Postgres.

pgFormatter Free Online version of pgFormatter a PostgreSQL SQL syntax beautifier (no line limit here up to 100000 characters). This SQL formatter/beautifier supports keywords from SQL-92, SQL-99, SQL-2003, SQL-2008, SQL-2011 and PostgreSQL specifics keywords. May

atlas A database schema management tool that works like Terraform—diff, apply, and keep your schema in check.

typespec Define your API once in a simple tsp file, then generate OpenAPI, gRPC, client code, and docs automatically.

ferronweb A fast, memory-safe web server powered by Rust. Similar to Caddy or Nginx but written in Rust.