Company as Code | VarBear

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VarBear

#SoftwareEngineering #Programming #DevTools

📝 A Few Words

Logic gates are the most successful abstraction ever invented. They run your phone, your car, your cloud, your AI models.

And.. almost nobody thinks about them anymore.

We celebrate frameworks, languages, architectures but every modern stack still collapses into: TRUE, FALSE, and how they combine.

I found this image funny because it reminded me of logic gates and that progress didn't replace logic. It just buried it under better naming.

I reality, when an abstraction survives this long, the next big change rarely comes from improving it. It comes from questioning whether it should exist in its current form at all.

Because there's an entire field betting that the next leap won't come from faster gates, but from breaking the idea that logic must be binary! Some people are already working on that.

That kind of shift never starts at the surface. It starts with people who still understand what the surface is made of.

You don't get to question an abstraction if you never learned it properly in the first place. You just inherit it, use it, and hope it holds.

That's the gap I try to work on with the guides and courses on FAUN.sensei(). Not predicting the next breakthrough, but making sure the mental models underneath today's systems are still solid enough to be questioned when the time comes.

If you want to dig into that, the code SENSEIFEBRUARY gives 20% off all courses throughout February.

Happy learning,
Aymen

🔍 Inside this Issue

From treating your org like code to rethinking team chat, this batch leans into structure over sprawl. We also cut through flaky CI, a repeatable AI coding workflow, and a clear take on what an async agent actually is, so dive in for the specifics that sharpen how you organize, ship, and collaborate.

🏢 Company as Code
💬 Discord Alternatives, Ranked
🚨 GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team
🤖 I struggled to code with AI until I learned this workflow
🧭 What Is an Async Agent, Really?

Ship smarter, then teach someone else.

Until next time!
FAUN.dev() Team

🔗 Stories, Tutorials & Articles

omnara.com

What Is an Async Agent, Really?

An async agent is not inherently async, it depends on whether you wait for it to finish or not. Async agents can manage their own event loop of other agents, spawning and coordinating them to handle tasks, just like an async runtime in programming. This architectural distinction allows for concurrent execution and efficient task delegation within a team of agents.

newsletter.systemdesign.one

I struggled to code with AI until I learned this workflow

AI coding assistants work best when given clear context, a specific plan, and implemented in small, reviewable steps. Start with context, then a plan, and iterate through implementation and testing to avoid AI freelancing pitfalls.

iankduncan.com

GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team

A seasoned CI engineer lays into GitHub Actions - too fragile, too fuzzy, too slow. Logs glitch. YAML confuses. Compute chokes. It solves for convenience, not power.

Buildkite steps in with stronger bones: reproducible runs, clean orchestration, and scalable agents you control.

taggart-tech.com

Discord Alternatives, Ranked

A veteran Discord admin did a deep dive into chat platform alternatives - Signal, Matrix, Zulip, Rocket.Chat, Discourse - stacked against five key pillars: functionality, openness, security, safety, and decentralization. Discord didn't come out looking great. Centralized. No end-to-end encryption. Shaky data persistence. The evaluation spotlights rising open-source players with stronger privacy and longer-term values baked in.

blog.42futures.com

Company as Code ^✅

Organisations rely heavily on digital systems, yet manage important organisational data using outdated manual methods despite advanced automation capabilities in other areas. A novel "Company as Code" concept proposes a programmatic representation of the entire organisation, enabling structured, version-controlled, and automated management of policies, compliance, and organisational structures. Existing tools struggle to holistically capture these relationships, but a graph-based DSL can effectively model complex organisational structures, policies, and regulatory implications. Integrating with real-world data and external systems through a plug-in architecture can bridge the gap between the programmatic model and operational reality.

👉 Got something to share? Create your FAUN Page and start publishing your blog posts, tools, and updates. Grow your audience, and get discovered by the developer community.

⚙️ Tools, Apps & Software

github.com

ZFC-Digital/cf-clearance-scraper

This library was created for testing and training purposes to retrieve the page source of websites, create Cloudflare Turnstile tokens and create Cloudflare WAF sessions.

github.com

KeygraphHQ/shannon

Fully autonomous AI hacker to find actual exploits in your web apps. Shannon has achieved a 96.15% success rate on the hint-free, source-aware XBOW Benchmark.

github.com

xhtml2pdf/xhtml2pdf

A library for converting HTML into PDFs using ReportLab

github.com

wiedymi/restty

Powerful, lightweight web terminal. Batteries included. Powered by libghostty-vt, WebGPU, and text-shaper.

github.com

hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code

A curated list of awesome skills, hooks, slash-commands, agent orchestrators, applications, and plugins for Claude Code by Anthropic

👉 Spread the word and help developers find and follow your Open Source project by promoting it on FAUN. Get in touch for more information.

🤔 Did you know?

Did you know that Protocol Buffers store each field’s ID as a tiny number, and smaller numbers take less space on the wire? Fields numbered 1 to 15 fit in one byte, while larger numbers need more bytes, so putting the most common fields in that range makes messages smaller and faster to decode. Protobuf also has a packed mode for repeated numbers, which writes one header and then all the values together instead of repeating the header each time.

🤖 Once, SenseiOne Said

"Most DevTools speed up typing; the work was never typing. Productivity is closing the gap between being wrong and learning it."
- SenseiOne

(*) SenseiOne is FAUN.dev’s work-in-progress AI agent

⚡Growth Notes

When you rename or delete anything shared for reuse, always schedule time immediately to search for every call site, cached assumption, and downstream copy of the pattern, then leave a small note or test guarding against the old shape creeping back in. That tiny habit around propagation changes how often you end up quietly rebuilding the same fragile extension point every year under a different name.

Each week, we share a practical move to grow faster and work smarter

😂 Meme of the week

❤️ Thanks for reading

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VarBear #515: Company as Code
Legend: ✅ = Editor's Choice / ♻️ = Old but Gold / ⭐ = Promoted / 🔰 = Beginner Friendly

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