Tech Watch & Dev

Can anyone get to railway.com

Been about 30 minutes.

So railway is down, and all my production .env keys are on there without me able to access them to export the project to another hosting service. They apparently got suspended from their google cloud account, leading to everyone's sites going down.

Go to their site, you'll see.

🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

Junior devs aren't struggling because the market is bad, they're struggling because the work that used to justify hiring a junior dev is just gone. It is quietly camouflaged into what a senior dev can do in an afternoon with Copilot.

The junior role always did the boring stuff, the small bugs, the simple features, the stuff nobody wants to touch, and in return you get proximity to a real codebase and people who've seen things go wrong, that proximity was the actual education.

that boring stuff is what AI does now.

So nobody cancelled the junior role, the economics just shifted and the role kind of dissolved on its own.

Bootcamps are still running, cs programs are still graduating people, everyone's still saying build projects, do leetcode, contribute to open source as if the path is the same as it was five years ago

Senior devs still have jobs because you need actual judgment to work with AI output, you need to have seen enough things break badly to know when the generated code is confidently wrong, but that judgment comes from years of doing the work that doesn't exist for juniors anymore

so how do you get the experience if the entry point is gone

Hey everyone, i'm looking to build a pretty straightforward mobile app for my small business but have literally zero coding background. I've been researching different mobile app builders and there's just so many options out there - some drag and drop, some that claim to use AI, some that are more template based.

I need something that can handle basic stuff like user accounts, push notifications, maybe some simple e-commerce functionality. Budget isn't huge but i'm willing to invest in something that actually works well.

The overwhelming part is that every platform claims to be "the easiest" or "no coding required" but then you read reviews and half the people say you still need technical knowledge to do anything decent.

For those who've actually built apps without a coding background, what platform worked best for you? And realistically, how much time should i expect to invest in learning whatever tool i choose?

Context for why I'm asking: I maintain a CLI tool in the IaC space and just shipped a major release that assumes agents are now the primary caller (e.g. predicate flags so the agent doesn't compose jq | python | wc pipelines, output format that strips JSON's redundant field names) rather than humans at a terminal. Before I keep building in that direction, I want to sanity-check with this sub: is "agents writing IaC in prod" actually a thing yet, or am I betting on a future that's still a year out?

I just got a few requests, but my job is keeping me busy enough. Now I'm wondering if it makes sense to start your own agency still in 2026. After all, most people can vibe code what they need. It is only the leads I've got now that make me think...

I'm a product engineer with 10 YOE, so my skills are good. I know some juniors, too.

Most requests I get are way easy, too.

What do you guys think?

Hey everyone,
I’m currently a Cloud/DevOps engineer. With AI rapidly automating things like boilerplate YAML, standard CI/CD pipelines, and basic log analysis, I'm trying to be proactive about my next career move.
For those already adapting:
Where do you see traditional DevOps going over the next few years?
What do you think is the most reliable, high-demand career shift adjacent to DevOps right now? (e.g., Platform Engineering, MLOps, DevSecOps?)
Would love to hear your thoughts on where to focus my upskilling. Thanks!

I wanted to find out how Cities: Skylines drives the constant motion you see in a growing city - residents looking for jobs, tourists visiting attractions, garbage trucks doing their rounds, even cims looking for love - and I couldn’t find much written up about it. So I decompiled the game and dug in. What I found is that almost every interaction in the game runs through a single, elegant system: a stock-market-style trading market.

---

I wrote this post a few years back, and recently updated it to add detail to areas I thought lacked sufficient explanation.

I found it really interesting to explore how Colossal Order built such a versatile system, I hope it will be an interesting read to anyone involved in game development.

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions! Thanks for reading.

This is a really intriguing idea, because I actually often use LLMs in this fashion, forcing them to not provide any code or direct answers, and instead walk through the process iteratively, while manually implementing and taking the time to write the code myself. Slower work, but better work.

started with a CS call back in January, then 2 Zendesk tickets in February, then a Slack thread someone in support kicked off in March that died with zero replies, and first time the issue showed up in our Jira backlog was last week, already P0 and tied to a churn risk on one of our biggest accounts.

sat in the post-mortem yesterday and everyone wanted to know why engineering didn’t catch it sooner, and i’m sitting there thinking, where on that timeline was i supposed to discover this…

Was i supposed to be reading every Zendesk ticket personally or dialing into every cs call from January onward just in case one of them was the one that mattered.

Once the issue reached us it was already an outage in everything but name, and somehow the post-mortem is shaped like we’re the people who missed it.

4 months across 4 systems, and the only team that opens a ticket about it is the team getting asked why it took so long.

dont even know what the right answer is supposed to be.

What it is:

Guess the S&P 500 stock ticker in 6 tries. Works like Wordle — green/yellow/gray feedback after each guess. New ticker every day.

Tickerdle.org

What I built:

- Daily, Endless, and Higher or Lower game modes

- Real-time player counter

- Live stock chart as the background (shows the actual price history of the ticker you're guessing)

- Leaderboard

- Mobile responsive

- Full backend with ticker validation, chart data proxying and daily puzzle logic

Stack:

- Frontend: React 18 + Vite + Tailwind CSS

- Backend: Node.js + Express + WebSockets (ws)

- Stock data: yahoo-finance2 (server-side, so the answer ticker is never exposed to the client)

- Hosting: Hetzner VPS + nginx + PM2 + Let's Encrypt

- No database — game state lives in localStorage

It's been a fun project, combining two things I love, markets and puzzle games. Would love to hear any feedback or feature ideas from this community!

Hello everyone,

Wanted to share a super cool project (IMO) we have been working on. It’s a zero-dependency React data grid, called LyteNyte Grid. Check it out, and hopefully, you will find it useful and save yourself a ton of time.

Some of the reasons to use LyteNyte Grid.

• Crazy Performance: LyteNyte Grid is super light at only 40kb (gzipped) and is extremely fast. It can handle millions of rows and 10,000+ updates/sec. Based on our internal benchmarks, it is one of the fastest grids available on the market.

• Feature-rich: Brings 150+ features, most of which are free and open source. Features such as cell range selection, row master-detail, and row grouping are included for free with LyteNyte Grid. This is something we are quite proud of. There are paid libraries (I won't name them) that offer less.

• No Styling Tradeoffs: With LyteNyte Grid, you can choose whether to go headless or styled. There is basically no tradeoff when considering styling choices.

• Full Prop Driven: You can configure it declaratively from your state, whether it’s URL params, server state, Redux, or whatever else you can imagine, meaning zero sync headaches.

• Unique DX Experience: Our grid is built in React for React and has a clean declarative API, which eliminates awkward configuration workarounds.

We also recently dropped LyteNyte Grid AI Skills. This is a really nice feature if you’re using AI coding agents. It lets you describe an advanced data grid solution, and your AI agent codes it for you. We have been testing this with increasingly complex grid instances, and the results have been awesome.

All our code is publicly available on GitHub. Happy to answer any questions you may have.

If you find this helpful and like what we’re building, GitHub stars help. Feature suggestions and code contributions are always welcome.

• GitHub
• Live Demo

Was surprised to keep seeing the same project appear again and again on my feed. I saw a comment calling out the OP for the same thing, which led to searching their (hidden) post history, which reveals a long tail of the same project getting posted again and again, and somehow always receiving upvotes and positives comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolgithubprojects/comments/1thobk4/comment/omp3p6n/

I am not even against authors sharing their projects. But manipulating votes, adding fake comments, hiding post history, deleting posts that didn't land well (get called out for AI slop), etc. and then doubling down when called out, all of this is just disingenuous behavior that erodes the community's trust.

Every website has it, being reddit, youtube, etc

For example on a reddit comment, you might see "2y" to indicate the comment was posted 2 years ago

Initially, the way it worked is that it would show "2 years ago" until we cross the 3rd anniversary, then it becomes "3 years ago"

But recently this behaviour has changed on all major websites I can think of. Now, it might show "3 years ago" if it was 2.6 years ago for example, and I find this rounding to be very confusing

Has it always worked like that or am I not crazy and the behaviour actually changed?

My theory is that they all rely on the same javascript library and that it recently changed its behaviour, but I couldn't verify this

Moved from VS Code to Windsurf two months ago and it changed how fast I build. The AI flow is better than anything I used before.

But VS Code had an ecosystem of security plugins, Windsurf has nothing at that layer. Last week a dependency it suggested came from an account with three packages and zero publish history. In VS Code a plugin would have caught that before I accepted it.

What are Windsurf users doing for security coverage right now?

title

Hi there,

My name is Cooper, and I’m currently building my path toward becoming a DevOps Engineer.

I’m studying through self-learning programs such as Harvard University CS50x and the IBM DevOps & Software Engineering program.

My roadmap also includes preparing for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification and the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional certification.

I’m focusing on building real projects on GitHub to gain practical experience in Linux, Docker, CI/CD, cloud, automation, and Kubernetes.

From your experience, do candidates with strong GitHub projects and certifications still have a real chance to compete in DevOps without a traditional computer science degree?

I’d really appreciate your honest opinion and any advice you can share.

Thank you for your time.

I work for a company and the company is way too big to operate the way that we do.

Our entire release process basically hinges on a group of 4-5 platform engineers monitoring the e2e release process, which takes place in a variety of regions across the globe.

One team member often has to stay up, multiple times throughout the week, from 8PM to 4AM when things are really bad, shorter when things go as plan.

To me, this is absolutely insane. They might catch up on sleep the next day, but people are always sick or always out and they have no time to actually work on the platform.

I would never agree to it, I'll quit this job as soon as they ask me to take part in that process.

What do you all have for off-hours expectations?

EDIT:

To anyone who is going to comment on the poor release process. To maybe save yourself the effort, everyone knows it sucks. Everyone knows it can be improved. The company has put effort into improving it, but soon as they start, they get yanked in a different direction and it ceases to be the priority.

Our company is over 5000 employees, over 1000 engineers. It's going to be a slow process to get them to change, and right now they're basically just running on the backs of pure good will from this small team of platform engineers.