July 2026

Things I’m seeing/reading/watching/listening to in July 2026…

Tools

• FNM
  • Fast Node Manager - Fast and simple Node.js version manager, built in Rust
  • brew install fnm
• act: Run GitHub Actions locally
  • A powerful developer utility by Nektos that simulates GitHub runners locally using Docker, enabling quick workflow testing and debugging (nektosact.com).
• Dev Containers
  • A development container (or dev container for short) allows you to use a container as a full-featured development environment. It can be used to run an application, to separate tools, libraries, or runtimes needed for working with a codebase, and to aid in continuous integration and testing. Dev containers can be run locally or remotely, in a private or public cloud, in a variety of supporting tools and editors.

Videos

Podcasts

Posts

• Kotlin Toolchain 0.11: The Next Step for Amper
  • A Reddit discussion on the release of Amper 0.11.0, which has officially evolved into the Kotlin Toolchain, reaching Alpha status and bringing major tooling improvements.
• An opinionated (and mainly correct) guide to naming
  • A popular programming thread highlighting practical rules, patterns, and best practices for naming code symbols to minimize cognitive load.
• Quick tutorial: How to use the latest Docker 29.5.2
  • Anatoly Krivitsky walks through configuring and integrating Docker 29.5.2 into modern enterprise Java / Spring Boot application setups.
• Fintech Engineering Handbook
  • A comprehensive, 25-page guide by Boytek Pitura on building robust software that handles money, detailing zero-trust engineering constraints, accounting ledger patterns, and currency representations.
• So You Want to Fix Your All Hands
  • Michael Lopp (“Rands”) breaks down why corporate All Hands meetings often miss the mark and shares actionable suggestions for making them engaging and valuable.
• The HTTP QUERY Method (RFC 10008)
  • Standardizing a safe, idempotent, and cacheable HTTP method that accepts a request body—offering a robust alternative to GET and POST for complex search queries.
• Claude Code Best Practices
  • The official documentation guide from Anthropic covering recommended workflows, session context management, and diff verification patterns for using Claude Code.
• Fumadocs
  • A highly flexible, open-source React/Next.js framework designed for building fully customizable, search-optimized developer documentation.
• The llms.txt standard
  • A proposed standard for putting a structured, agent-readable Markdown map (llms.txt) at website roots to help AI agents navigate and index site content efficiently.
• My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite
  • Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, on why Bun moved off Zig to Rust - arguing the split was about diverging values, management style and code quality rather than any technical limitation of the language.
• The Ungradeable Career
  • Addy Osmani argues that anything gradeable by someone else is being automated, so the durable skills are problem selection, taste, delegating to agents, last-mile polish, and taking accountability for what you ship.
• Local models for agentic coding
  • Birgitta Böckeler (Thoughtworks) revisits running local models on a 48-64GB Mac for coding agent work - privacy and token cost are the drivers, but tool-calling reliability and latency are still the binding constraints.
• I Could’ve Rickrolled the Entire FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID.
  • Registering on FIFA’s public football-agent platform silently added the account to FIFA’s shared Entra tenant, exposing internal systems guarded only by client-side authorisation checks - including live RTMP ingest URLs and stream keys for World Cup 2026 camera feeds.
• DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs
  • Unmesh Joshi makes the case that constraining an LLM to a DSL - fewer syntactic variations, plus a validator it can self-correct against - produces far more reliable generated code than free-form language output.
• The Archaeologist’s Copilot
  • Nik Malykhin on reviving a 20-year-old Java 1.5 codebase: vague “make it work” prompts produced confident hallucinations, while treating the AI as a forensic analyst and rebuilding a 2008-accurate Docker baseline actually worked. “AI defaults to optimism… in a restoration mission, optimism is fatal.”
• I solved software development forever
  • Vladyslav Nyzhashchyy’s tongue-in-cheek writeup of a six-stage /build pipeline - brainstorm, plan, plan review, implement, verify, ship - running agents in isolated git worktrees with parallel security/overengineering/test-coverage reviews and a human gate on merge.
• I review database schemas regularly - AI-generated ones
  • An r/Database thread on the recurring modelling mistakes that show up in AI-generated schemas, and what a reviewer looks for.
• Jurassic Park Computers in Excruciating Detail
  • Fabien Sanglard catalogues every machine on screen in the 1993 film - SGI Crimson and Indigo workstations, Quadra 700s, a Thinking Machines CM-5, and the fsn 3D file browser behind “It’s a Unix system!” - roughly $1.7M of loaned hardware.
• Why did spec-driven development never take off?
  • The Pragmatic Engineer talks to Dexter Horthy (HumanLayer) about specs and code inevitably drifting into two competing sources of truth, and his Research-Plan-Implement alternative that treats documentation as disposable per-cycle output.

Other

• Refactoring.Guru
  • A beautifully designed, beginner-friendly resource providing comprehensive guides on design patterns, code smells, and refactoring techniques.
• openDAW
  • A free, open-source, web-based Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that runs entirely in the browser, offering audio/MIDI recording and a note editor.
• AIUP Studio
  • A web workspace giving stakeholders a single shared view of projects following the AI Unified Process - structured spec editors, auto-generated diagrams, and Git-backed version control.
• The Mandy Money Book
  • An illustrated Australian personal finance guide for teenagers and young adults, covering 169+ real-world money and life-admin topics from budgeting and payslips through to investing and property.