Computer Science and Programming

A beginner-friendly explainer on how passkeys work using public/private key cryptography, where a private key stays on your device and a public key is shared with the website. Covers the core handshake mechanism, compares passkeys to passwords and password managers, and offers a measured take on their real-world trade-offs — including device dependency and phishing resistance — without overselling them as a universal solution.

Video.js v10.0.0 beta is a ground-up rewrite merging Video.js, Plyr, Vidstack, and Media Chrome into a single modern framework. Key highlights include an 88% reduction in default bundle size (66% even without ABR), a new composable streaming engine called SPF that enables much smaller adaptive bitrate bundles, first-class React and TypeScript support, unstyled UI primitives inspired by Radix/Base UI, and a shadcn-style skin ejection system. The architecture is fully composable — unused features are tree-shaken out. Three presets ship with the beta: video, audio, and background video. New skins were designed by Plyr's creator Sam Potts. GA is targeted for mid-2026, with migration guides for Video.js v8, Plyr, Vidstack, and Media Chrome planned before then.

Mozilla has introduced Kit, a new visual mascot and companion character for Firefox. Kit is a fox-like creature (drawing from both fox and red panda attributes) designed to appear in welcoming or encouraging moments within the browser, on Mozilla's website, blog, social media, and community events. Created by illustrator Marco Palmieri in partnership with agency JKR, Kit was deliberately hand-crafted — not AI-generated — with distinctive design choices like no mouth and an expressive tail. Kit is not an AI assistant or chatbot, but a brand character meant to make Firefox's user-first, privacy-respecting values feel more visible and approachable.

Room 3.0 alpha has been released, marking a major breaking version of the Android database library. Key changes include dropping SupportSQLite APIs in favor of SQLiteDriver, exclusive Kotlin code generation (no more Java), dropping KAPT/annotation processing in favor of KSP only, and making coroutines mandatory for DAO functions. Room 3.0 adds Kotlin Multiplatform support for JavaScript and WebAssembly via a Web Worker-based SQLite driver using the Origin Private File System. The library moves to a new Maven package (androidx.room3). A new @DaoReturnTypeConverter annotation enables custom DAO return types. Room 2.x enters maintenance mode with only bug fix releases planned until Room 3 stabilizes. Migration paths include adopting SQLiteDriver APIs in Room 2.7+ and using the new room-sqlite-wrapper compatibility artifact.

HTML streaming allows servers to send HTML progressively rather than in one chunk, enabling browsers to render content as it arrives. HTMS is an experimental project that extends basic streaming with progressive placeholders that can be updated asynchronously within a single HTTP response. This approach delivers early First Contentful Paint, maintains SEO-friendly complete HTML documents, and achieves strong Lighthouse scores without client-side hydration. The technique works best combined with SSR, SSG, or tools like HTMX, though it introduces constraints around error handling once streaming begins and requires careful layout planning.

Chrome 146 introduces three notable features for web developers. Scroll-triggered animations enable declarative CSS-based control of animations based on scroll position, replacing common JavaScript-based scroll detection patterns. Scoped custom element registries allow multiple custom element definitions for the same tag name within a page, preventing naming conflicts when using libraries from multiple sources. The Sanitizer API provides a built-in way to strip script-executing content from user-supplied HTML, making it easier to build XSS-free web apps — this updated version is also available in Firefox.

Neodrag is a multi-framework JavaScript library that provides drag-and-drop functionality across React, Svelte, Vue, SolidJS, and vanilla JavaScript. It features a small bundle size (3.46KB), server-side rendering compatibility, TypeScript support, and consistent behavior across all supported frameworks through shared core logic.

WinUI Gallery 2.8 has been released, adding Windows jump list integration that lets users quickly access favorited or recently viewed samples from the taskbar. The release includes new samples for AppWindow TitleBar customization, jump lists, and improved clipboard operations. Additional improvements include 60+ new Segoe Fluent Icons, accessibility enhancements, upgraded .NET 9 and Windows App SDK 1.85 support, and improved launch performance.

Python remains the top choice for AI/ML and automation, while Rust gains momentum for systems programming and blockchain development. JavaScript/TypeScript continues dominating web development, Go excels for backend microservices, and Swift/Kotlin rule mobile development. The guide provides career-specific language recommendations and emphasizes choosing based on your goals rather than popularity alone. 

The Avalonia team has released a preview of a fully rewritten Visual Studio Code extension for Avalonia UI development. Built on a new shared XAML parser that also powers the Visual Studio extension, it brings feature parity between both IDEs. Key improvements include dramatically enhanced IntelliSense with richer completions and x:DataType Quick Info, Go To Definition support, clearer error diagnostics, automatic XAML namespace imports, event handler generation, and a more reliable XAML previewer with better DPI handling and zoom features. Notably, the extension is now part of the paid Avalonia Accelerate subscription and is no longer open-source, though free community licences are available for organizations under €1M in revenue.

Alphabet has structured a three-year compensation package for Google CEO Sundar Pichai potentially worth $692 million, largely tied to performance metrics including new stock incentives linked to Waymo and Wing, its drone delivery venture. The deal could make Pichai one of the highest-paid executives globally. Meanwhile, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been making headlines for purchasing lavish Miami properties, widely interpreted as a response to California's proposed Billionaire Tax Act targeting net worths over $1 billion.

PostgreSQL's `random_page_cost` has been set to 4.0 by default for ~25 years, but experiments on modern SSDs show the actual cost ratio of random vs. sequential I/O is closer to 25-35x, not 4x. This means the planner picks suboptimal plans (sequential scan instead of index scan) for selectivities between 0.2% and 2.2%. Settingindex scan) for seleto ~30 aligns cost estimates with actual durations. However, lowering the value can still be justified in OLTP workloads with high cache hit rates, where random I/O avoids expensive full table scans. A complicating factor is that prefetching (which benefits sequential and bitmap scans but not index scans) interacts withties between 0.2% anin non-obvious ways, and the current cost model ignores prefetching entirely. Proposed improvements include separating non-I/O costs fromshow the actual cost better cache statistics, and incorporating prefetching into the cost model.

Metabase has launched Data Studio, a new workspace within Metabase for curating a semantic layer and transforming raw data into analytics-ready datasets. It ships with tools including a Library for trusted analytics content, Data Structure for table metadata, a Glossary for business terms, a Dependency Graph for visualizing content relationships, Dependency Diagnostics for identifying broken or unused items, and Transforms for writing query results back to the database. Core features are available in the open-source edition, with additional capabilities in Pro and Enterprise tiers. Data Studio is part of the Metabase v59 release.

Kasal is a new visual, no-code platform built on Databricks for designing, deploying, and monitoring agentic AI workflows. It uses a drag-and-drop canvas or conversational assistant to let both technical and non-technical users build single and multi-agent systems without writing orchestration code. Under the hood it leverages CrewAI for agent orchestration and integrates with MLflow for tracing, Databricks Apps for deployment, and supports MCP servers, Genie, and custom APIs. Workflows can be exported as code for further customization, and a catalog enables reuse across teams.

Windows Terminal 1.25 is now available in the Preview Channel, bringing several new features: a Settings Search UI, a graphical key binding editor for actions, built-in Kitty Keyboard Protocol support for better input disambiguation, and community translations for Serbian (Cyrillic) and Ukrainian. Miscellaneous improvements include configurable Unicode ambiguous character width, a 10-20% I/O throughput boost from re-enabled guided optimization, VS Code Modern Dark/Light color schemes, and several bug fixes around elevated sessions, search behavior, and rendering artifacts. Windows Terminal stable is also updated to 1.24 with features from the previous preview cycle.

Brad Frost introduces the concept of 'Real-Time UI', where AI and design systems are used together to generate working UI prototypes live during meetings. The idea aims to make design more collaborative and participatory by lowering the barrier to creating digital interfaces, allowing teams to visualize and iterate on ideas in real time rather than spending meetings discussing abstract concepts. The post also promotes an upcoming AI & Design Systems course.

DuckDB 1.5 brings major performance improvements and new features. The new VARIANT type enables automatic JSON shredding for 10-100x faster semi-structured data queries. Min/max queries are 6-18x faster via statistics-based optimization, complex joins now leverage hash joins more broadly, and Top-N-by-group queries can be up to 70x faster. Common Subplan Elimination speeds up complex CTEs. New capabilities include reading entire folders of DuckDB files, writing to Azure Blob and ADLSv2 storage, non-blocking checkpointing with parallel WAL files (17% TPC-H throughput boost), and DuckLake 0.4 with macros and sorted tables.