Top picks — 2026 April
What a month! GitHub went down six million times, eleven thousand Vercel security holes have been unveiled, Copilot doesn’t accept new signups due to a super unsustainable business model (finally someone admitted it), Anthropic landed on top of Hacker News billions of times due to some drama, popular npm packages have new malware injected again and tons more. This all happened in the past month. The tech world doesn’t slow down, the quality of the software is going downhill, massive layoffs all over the place. If you want to stay optimistic, spending time in front of a computer is not a good idea, so you seriously better go out and touch grass.
Some good music, as every month, is waiting for you here, and a few links that I found particularly interesting this past month. Enjoy reading and listening, and I will catch you next month 💌
Album of the month
I was shocked when I visited my local records store on RSD (Record Store Day) and I found most of the discography of Lack of Afro. I love his heavy drums style, mostly fast paced raw funk. Modern, but with this old, JB (James Brown) kinda of groove to it. When I took the record home and listened to it for the first time after many years, I couldn’t stop playing “Rusty” which is based on a drum line from “Fire Eater” by Rusty Bryant. What a tune! What a monster tune for bboys! Naturally “Press On” by Lack of Afro is my album recommendation for this month.
Top picks
“The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon” by Lars Thießen
This game is close to my heart. When we got our first family computer a few decades ago, I was the one who occupied it for the most time. My sister really enjoyed looking at me playing games a lot more than playing on her own. Twitch later on proved that she was not a weirdo at all, as there are millions of others who prefer to take a back seat. For me, it was a perfect deal. RollerCoaster Tycoon was my sister’s domain though — she was so, so, so good at it! Ever since, I have good feelings about this title. This post goes in depth into some of the game design decisions that made this game so revolutionary at the time.
“How Email Actually Works” by Sushant Dhiman
I use email every day, and it is embarrassing how little I knew about the way it works before reading this post. I also browse the web daily and I know tonnes about the protocols and transfer layers involved in that. This article helped me to fill the gaps in my knowledge. Well explained step by step and all the technologies involved in every single process of authenticating, receiving and sending emails.
“Protect Your Shed” by Dylan Butler
I loved this article. The difference between writing code for an enterprise organisation at work, vs the little side projects that passionate people create on their own time aligns with my experience as well, as everything that keeps me going as a software creator comes from these extra hours I spent after writing enterprise-level code at work. Good read, good analogy!
“How I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack” by Steve Hanov
Good reminder not to overoptimize prematurely. I found this article at the perfect time in my life, where I’m in the middle of untangling the difference between multiple AWS services, because I am trying to deploy a container. Maybe I don’t need a container at all. Maybe you also don’t.
“Bring Back Idiomatic Design” by John Loeber
A great reminder of the design idioms, why we missed them and how we can bring them back. Another article from the category “just keep it simple,” but surprisingly, no matter how often advice like that comes out, the industry still struggles to implement it. Quite the opposite is the reality nowadays, unfortunately.
“Accepted proposal: UUID in the Go standard library” by Redowan Delowar
Redowan Delowar’s blog is one of my favourite resources for learning Go. He is such a good blogger, super active and insanely helpful. Here is his little recap of the UUID proposal being added to the Go standard library. The day has come and I really hope that with the release of 1.27, I will be able to replace github.com/google/uuid with the built-in uuid.
“The importance of people who care” by Rachel Andrew
Beautifully written by Rachel Andrew. I love her writing and her deep attention to detail in her craft. Her talks, her posts, her presentation slides. Rachel has been hugely inspiring to me since I started learning web development, and she still is a mentor today.
“The Courage to Stop” by Jeffrey Zeldman
Another banger post on the same vibe as Rachel’s article. It is funny that in the age of AI-generated everything, I value non-techy posts a lot more than before this whole madness.
Zed is 1.0
Although I’m not a daily user of Zed, I’m a fan. I played around with it years ago and open it from time to time just to be amazed at how well polished an IDE it is. This is a really viable competitor to Visual Studio Code that absolutely dominates the market. Good! In my opinion, everything about Zed is better than VSCode: the look, the feel, the defaults, the memory consumption, and the fact that it still feels more like a tool to write code first rather than a chat to interact with LLMs. If you use a GUI, this is the one you should give a go to if you haven’t already.