Azure SQL Dev Hub opens one front door for building against Azure SQL
Building an app against Azure SQL has always involved a small scavenger hunt: which service tier fits your workload, which connection library your language wants, which quickstart actually applies. Microsoft’s new Azure SQL Dev Hub, announced in public preview, tries to collapse that hunt into a single starting point in the Azure portal. Per the […]
The lunar terminator paradox, worked out with code
Why the moon points the wrong way at sunset There is an old astronomical puzzle that most people meet while camping: after the sun sets, the lit part of the moon sometimes seems to point up, toward empty sky, instead of down toward where the sun just went. It is called the lunar terminator paradox, […]
Go Concurrency Distilled: A Free Interactive Refresher for Goroutines and Channels
Anton Zhiyanov published Go Concurrency Distilled, a free interactive mini-book covering 17 Go concurrency topics, from goroutines and channels up through atomics and diagnostics. Every example runs in the browser, so you can change the code and rerun it without installing anything. A static PDF version lives in the nalgeon/go-conc-distilled repository if you prefer reading […]
Inside the Intel 8087’s Tangent Algorithm: CORDIC With a Polynomial Twist
Ken Shirriff has published another die-level deep dive, this time reverse-engineering how the Intel 8087 computes tangents. The 8087 was Intel’s 1980 floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 and 8088, the chip you soldered into an empty socket on an IBM PC motherboard to make spreadsheets and CAD stop crawling. It computed a tangent in about […]
Azure Functions Ends Support for Node.js 22: Upgrade to Node.js 24 by April 30, 2027
Microsoft posted a retirement notice on the Azure Updates roadmap on September 22: support for Azure Functions apps running Node.js 22 ends on April 30, 2027. After that date your function apps keep running, but they stop getting security patches, updates, and customer support for the runtime. That is the standard Azure runtime retirement pattern, […]
Compiler optimizations, proven in Lean, squeeze 19 percent out of Skia rendering
A paper accepted at OOPSLA 2026 applies compiler theory to something most of us never think of as a compiler target: the draw commands behind every web page. In Semantics for 2D Rasterization, three researchers from the University of Utah built a formal model of Skia, the graphics library that renders Chrome, Firefox, Android, Flutter, […]
PyPy 8.0.0 ships first Python 3.12 support and starts the abi3 wheels push
The PyPy team released PyPy 8.0.0 on September 19, 2026, and it is a bigger deal than the version number suggests. Yes, there is the expected round of interpreter updates. The headline, though, is buried in the release notes: this version lays the real groundwork for CPython’s limited ABI, which could finally close the gap […]
Cloudflare quick tunnels get an agent-era relaunch
Cloudflare Quick Tunnels are back in the news this week, and the Hacker News thread about them hit 600-plus points in a day. The twist is that the feature itself is not new. Cloudflare launched quick tunnels in September 2021, and the company’s own announcement from that era describes the same core trick. What is […]
Uber’s fix for retry storms: only retry the errors you own
Uber published a post this week on retry storms that is worth your time if you operate anything with more than two services in a call chain. The interesting part is not the math, though the math is good. It is the admission that the industry-standard fixes, backoff, jitter, retry budgets, all manage the volume […]
Bend 2 proof-checks the code your AI writes
If you let an AI agent write most of your code, you eventually ship a bug you didn’t write either. Victor Taelin’s answer to that is Bend 2, a programming language where the compiler refuses to accept code that breaks a declared mathematical proof. The release hit the front page of Hacker News this week […]
Cutting eBPF CPU cost by 90 percent with inode memoization
A developer working on an eBPF-based security agent found that the most expensive thing his agent did was not enforcing policy decisions. It was figuring out which policy applied in the first place. The fix, an inode-level cache inside the kernel, cut kernel CPU cost by about 90 percent in benchmarks, and the whole thing […]
The azd extension framework is generally available
The Azure Developer CLI’s extension framework is now generally available. If you haven’t followed the azd project, extensions are the plugin system that lets teams add their own commands, automation, and service integrations to the CLI without forking it or wrapping it in scripts. The GA applies to the framework itself: the parts of azd […]