VarBear

Final days: The FAUN.sensei() launch discount expires soon. ⏳

Since we flipped the switch on FAUN.sensei(), the response has been incredible. It’s clear that many of you are ready to move beyond basic tutorials and learn from those who have already "lived the journey."

I’ve decided to keep the launch celebration going through the end of the year, but the clock is officially ticking. You have until December 31st to grab any (or all) of our inaugural courses at 25% off.

ℹ️ Use code SENSEI2525 at checkout.

The lineup has expanded! We’ve just added two new courses to the collection: a deep dive into the Helm ecosystem and a comprehensive guide to Generative AI. Here is the full list:

👉 Helm in Practice – Designing, Deploying, and Operating Kubernetes Applications at Scale

👉 Building with GitHub Copilot – Master the shift from coding to AI-assisted orchestration.

👉 Observability with Prometheus and Grafana – Hands-on guide to achieving true operational clarity.

👉 DevSecOps in Practice – How to actually operationalize security at scale.

👉 Cloud-Native Microservices With Kubernetes (2nd Edition) – The comprehensive blueprint for high-availability systems.

👉 Cloud Native CI/CD with GitLab – Streamlining the path from commit to production.

👉 End-to-End Kubernetes with Rancher, RKE2, K3s, Fleet, Longhorn, and NeuVector – The complete architectural journey to production.

👉 Generative AI For The Rest Of US – Your Future, Decoded

Remember, the SENSEI2525 code works as many times as you need, but it vanishes when the calendar turns to the new year.

See you on FAUN.sensei() !

— Aymen, Founder of FAUN.dev()

Speed freaks and sacred cows share the docket—AVX‑512 turbocharges Unicode, Segment folds 140+ services back into a monolith, and someone renders QR codes with nothing but SQL. Around the edges: Rustier tools, governance that actually holds, and a few engineering dogmas worth retiring—the rabbit holes await below.

🚫 5 engineering dogmas it's time to retire
🚀 Full Unicode Search at 50× ICU Speed with AVX–512
🧱 Goodbye Microservices
🦀 Google Releases Magika 1.0: AI File Detection in Rust
🧮 pqr.sql: Generate QR Codes with Pure SQL in PostgreSQL
🧪 Rust unit testing: file writing
🧭 Why I Didn’t Sign the Resonant Computing Manifesto: The Foundations Need Work
📰 The Architects of AI Are TIME's 2025 Person of the Year

Fewer myths, more momentum, go build.

Stay safe out there.
FAUN.dev() Team

Google released Magika 1.0, now powered by a Rust-based engine. File type support doubled, now over 200, including tricky formats like Jupyter, Numpy, and PyTorch.

Under the hood: ONNX Runtime handles fast model inference. Tokio brings async I/O muscle. And synthetic training data sharpens detection without bloating the model.

A sharp critique of the Resonant Computing Manifesto pushes it past vague ideals. It calls for real governance scaffolding, not just poetic prose.

Without that? The manifesto risks becoming just another glossy PDF for entrenched players to wave around while changing nothing.

Under the hood: What’s really on the table is flipping ethical tech from top-down declarations to bottom-up design, with structures that can’t be hijacked.

Twilio Segment collapsed 140+ destination-specific microservices into a single monolith, one repo, one set of dependencies, one test harness.

They leveled out version sprawl and built Traffic Recorder, a homegrown yakbak-based HTTP playback tool. That killed off hours-long test runs, dropping them to milliseconds. CI finally stopped flaking.

The monolith didn’t just simplify deployments, it cut down incidents and let teams move faster on shared code.

Dependencies are risky, especially in smaller companies - avoid unnecessary packages to prevent security incidents and maintain code simplicity. Feature flags can become overwhelming if abused, leading to complex codebases and false sense of security - use them wisely. Commenting code is a balance - aim for self-explanatory code, but don't shy away from adding comments for clarity when needed. Good Engineering Managers balance common practices with reality to ensure what's best for their teams in the long run.

To test file writes without hitting the disk, the author swaps in a closure that takes a file handle. That handle’s a test double, so after the code runs, you can crack it open and inspect what got written.

The Architects of AI drove the economy, shaped geopolitics, and changed the way we interact with the world.

StringZilla v4.5 drops a major speed bomb on Unicode text processing. Think 10× faster tokenization and case folding. Up to 150× faster for case-insensitive substring search. It leaves ICU and PCRE2 wheezing in the dust.

Under the hood: SIMD all the way, AVX-512 on newer chips, plus script-aware SIMD kernels. Unicode correctness stays intact, thanks to smart fallback paths.

A developer jammed out a QR code generator in pure SQL, just PostgreSQL, no extensions or libraries. One gnarly single-statement query. It even runs faster on PostgreSQL 17 than on 16, thanks to engine tweaks.

You've survived the on-call rotations, the hard work, and the marathons of 2025! It’s time for some better swag, so stop wearing boring shirts. Get yours from ByteVibe, where the gear actually represents our culture!

We're giving all our subscribers 25% off at ByteVibe, the home of "Rock 'n' Roll" dev gear.

Use code SUBSCR1B3R at checkout. Valid until Dec 31st!

At Reddit, the migration of comment endpoints from a legacy Python service to modern Go microservices was successful, resulting in improved performance and halved latency. The migration involved verifying and comparing writes to three production data stores and three sister data stores. Valuable insights were gained for future migrations, including addressing differences in languages and handling race conditions on updates. The goal is to continue migrating all core models to modern tech stacks for improved reliability and performance.

Learn the Bash Shell and master beginner all the way up to advanced Bash scripting techniques.

AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem.

Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

Hands-on MCP security lab: 10 real incidents reproduced with vulnerable/secure MCP servers, pytest regressions, and Claude/Cursor battle-tested exploit walkthroughs

Free, open-source file scanner

Did you know that a CockroachDB node will automatically shut down if its clock drifts too far from the rest of the cluster? CockroachDB uses hybrid logical clocks for timestamping, and if the mean clock offset to a majority of nodes exceeds about 80 % of the configured max offset (500 ms by default), the node exits to protect cluster consistency. To avoid this, operators keep clocks tightly synchronized with tools like chrony or NTP.

"We automate to avoid mistakes, then trust the automation and make bigger ones. Tools don't remove complexity; they move it to a layer fewer people can debug."
— SenseiOne

Pick one ugly system at work and quietly become the person who truly understands it, end to end. Every week, write down one precise observation about that system (perf quirk, failure mode, data oddity), then back it with a small, reproducible experiment in code or a script. Over time, organize those notes into a short internal doc with clear diagrams, numbers, and before/after metrics, not vague opinions. Share small fixes and insights from that doc just in time, when decisions are being made or incidents hit, so you are consistently useful at key moments. That mix of deep technical notes plus smart timing quietly repositions you from implementer to go-to engineer for hard problems.