VarBear

Speed demons meet failure modes: 100X workflows, LSM‑tree guts, a DRM takedown—and a smart bed bricked by an AWS sneeze. If moving faster without breaking users is your sport, pull the thread; the details inside are worth it.

🚀 100X Faster: How We Supercharged Netflix Maestro’s Workflow Engine
🗄️ Build Your Own Database
🪝 Discussion of the Benefits and Drawbacks of the Git Pre-Commit Hook
🛏️ Even Your Bed Isn’t Safe from AWS Outages - Eight Sleep Learns the Hard Way
🕵️ How I Reversed Amazon's Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked
📈 Measuring Engineering Productivity
🤖 State of AI Report 2025
🔧 You already have a git server

Keep your stack fast, your hooks sharp, and your fallbacks offline-ready.

Have a great week!
FAUN.dev() Team

Easily secure any site by putting SSL management on autopilot, supporting one-step validation and renewal via REST API.

Ark Labs just dropped the public beta of Arkade, a dev platform on the Ark protocol built for offchain Bitcoin payments and batching.

The roadmap? Bigger scripting. Tighter security. More integrations to actually do stuff with Bitcoin beyond hold it and hope.

An AWS hiccup on Oct 20 knocked out Eight Sleep's smart beds. No heat. No data. Just expensive rectangles. Now they're building an "outage mode" so the beds still work when the cloud flakes out.

Cloud DNS is the most cost-effective way to manage your domain names. You can use it with Free DNS or Premium DNS, depending on your needs. Our Cloud DNS service provides up to 10,000% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

ClouDNS offers Free DNS zone migration for all new customers!

Pre-commit hooks catch secrets and fix formatting before bad stuff hits your repo. But if they’re clunky or slow, devs bail. Tools like Pre-Commit, Husky, and devenv are trying to fix that. devenv stands out - hooks are baked right into your Nix env, no extra glue scripts.

The 2025 State of AI Report just landed - China’s catching up fast on reasoning and coding. Models like DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are starting to nip at OpenAI’s heels.

AI is thinking longer-term now. Reinforced reasoning and rubric-style feedback are pushing models into deeper, more deliberate planning. Embodied systems? Already moving. Gemini Robotics is out here running “Chain-of-Action” workflows in the real world. Think LLM meets robot arms.

Use is booming too. Forty-four percent of U.S. firms now pay for AI tools. Meanwhile, sovereign-backed multi-gigawatt datacenters are popping up. Scale like that screams industrial era.

A plain-old git repo on an SSH-accessible server can double as a lean deployment rig. Drop in some git hooks - like a post-receive - and every push can kick off static site builds or publish code on the spot. No extra tools. Just Git doing Git things.

Turns basic Git infra into a no-frills CI/CD pipeline. Cuts out the middleman.

A former engineering leader lays out a no-nonsense framework for tracking team output without turning into Big Brother. Think: daily Slack updates, weekly GitHub changelogs, tight 1:1s, demo-fueled All-Hands, and auto-verified deploys. It leans on public artifacts, not peeking over shoulders - and puts the reporting work where it belongs: on managers.

A developer cracked Kindle Cloud Reader’s font obfuscation, sidestepping randomized glyph swaps with SVG rendering and SSIM-powered perceptual hashing to rebuild actual EPUBs. Amazon rotates font mappings every five pages, using finicky micro-paths to jam scrapers and derail OCR. It wasn’t enough.

System shift: DRM is getting messier. Text scraping is out. Image parsing is the new game.

The Maestro engine has been revamped for jaw-dropping improvement: a speed boost of 100X with overhead slashed from seconds to milliseconds. The groundbreaking redesign delivers massive performance gains, solving past workflow development hurdles and elevating user experiences sky-high!

LSM trees fix the mess naive key-value stores run into. They blend in-memory sorted indexes with append-only disk files to keep things snappy. Writes get logged, not scattered. Reads stay fast. When files pile up, compaction and segmenting kick in to keep storage lean.

This is a rewrite of the storage playbook. LSM trees lean hard into write performance and memory smarts. Systems like LevelDB and DynamoDB run on them for a reason: scale demands it.

Show your Kubernetes pride with the Kubectl Heavy Blend™ Hoodie — soft, durable, and built for long dev sessions or quick rollouts. This hoodie keeps you warm and ready to ship, whether you’re scaling clusters, sipping coffee or debugging last week incident :)

Generate code from the terminal!

Python-free Rust inference server - OpenAI-API compatible. GGUF + SafeTensors, hot model swap, auto-discovery, single binary.

Collection of awesome LLM apps with AI Agents and RAG using OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and opensource models.

A professionally organized collection of 2,057 n8n workflows with a lightning-fast documentation system that provides instant search, analysis, and browsing capabilities.

Publish and install private python packages using OCI/docker registries.

Did you know setting CPU limits in Kubernetes can introduce hidden latency? At the kernel level, the Linux CFS quota uses a default 100 ms period (cpu.cfs_period_us=100 000) and once a container uses up its quota (cpu.cfs_quota_us) it’s throttled for the rest of the window. This means a short burst like a GC pause or TLS handshake could cause a ~100 ms stall - even if your service seems idle.

"We chase 'zero config' until the day we need the one knob the vendor didn’t expose. Convenience scales right up to the first exception. If you can't fork it, you don't control it."
— SenseiOne

This Week’s Human is Geoffrey Dayrit, Senior Lead Technical Program Manager, Global Security Services at Lumen Technologies. He leads programs for CMMC 2.0 compliance, GRC, IT asset and vulnerability management, and security audits - standing up a Global Security PMO grounded in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework; previously at S3 Shared Service Solutions, he ran a consortium portfolio with 9 senior executives to deliver concrete member‑experience and process improvements.