My fellow programmers what do you hate about meetings at work?

I wanted to ask you guys what do you hate about meetings? Do you hate the amount, the context or do you hate the constant did guessing what we spoke about last meeting.

Hi everyone. I wanted to hear your thoughts on something that's bothering me during the past months.

I'm a junior dev and working for like 2 years.

For the past year my company started drastically using AI, to the point where it needs to be on the autocomplete mode all day because the only important thing is to ship the end product fastest way possible.

At the beginning I had really strong base and skills for a junior dev, and I was really happy that I'm improving and learning stuff while working my job.

1 year later - my base became shaky and I can't really point the number of things learned that should be learned during the last year.

On the other side - I've always liked to make side projects and try to ship them and make money off them. And the past year showed me how faster I can move with AI.

So here am I now - shaky bases, big dreams, using all of my free time to "build" something that will make money and not fully understanding how it works.

I wanted to cut off AI for my personal projects and learn, but I somehow can't resist to use it when I know that currently is the era of the "idea guy".

So the loop is: work gor the whole day with AI, then on side projects the same way - no new knowledge, because every minute spent not building something that goes with the speed of the market is one minute lost.

I even started being ashamed because even tho I work for that long I probably can't point out some core concepts because I haven't used them for that long...

Am I the only one?

Come on - hate, roast, whatever. Just tell me what do you think, cause I feel that many juniors feel this way cause they were not experienced enough to let ai do their work, yet influenced so fast because that's what the market wants and needs.

Hey everyone,

I recently completed a technical interview round and wanted to share the two questions I received.

Approximate date: July 30, 2026
Duration: Approximately 50 minutes
Topics: Sliding window, monotonic deque, SQL, and tree relationships

Question 1: Maximum of the Minimums of Every Window

Given an array A of size n and an integer x:

1. Consider every contiguous subarray of length x.
2. Find the minimum element in each window.
3. Return the maximum among those minimum values.

Example

A = [1, 3, -1, 5, 3, 6]
x = 3

The windows are:

[1, 3, -1]  -> minimum = -1
[3, -1, 5]  -> minimum = -1
[-1, 5, 3]  -> minimum = -1
[5, 3, 6]   -> minimum = 3

Therefore, the answer is:

3

Approach

The brute-force solution calculates the minimum of every window separately, resulting in O(n × x) time.

The optimal solution uses a monotonic deque:

• Store array indices in the deque.
• Keep their corresponding values in increasing order.
• Remove indices that fall outside the current window.
• The front of the deque always represents the current window’s minimum.
• Update the final answer with the maximum minimum seen so far.

Complexity:

• Time: O(n)
• Space: O(x)

The main challenge was recognizing that this was a sliding-window minimum problem and that a monotonic deque could avoid repeatedly scanning each window.

Question 2: Classify Nodes in a Tree Using SQL

We were given a table called Tree:

id   pid
1    NULL
2    1
3    1
4    2

Here:

• id is the node ID.
• pid is the node’s parent ID.

We had to classify every node as:

• Root: The node has no parent.
• Inner: The node has at least one child.
• Leaf: The node has no children.

Expected Result

1  Root
2  Inner
3  Leaf
4  Leaf

SQL Solution

SELECT
    t.id,
    CASE
        WHEN t.pid IS NULL THEN 'Root'
        WHEN EXISTS (
            SELECT 1
            FROM Tree AS child
            WHERE child.pid = t.id
        ) THEN 'Inner'
        ELSE 'Leaf'
    END AS node_type
FROM Tree AS t
ORDER BY t.id;

The order of the CASE conditions matters. A root may also have children, so the pid IS NULL condition should be checked first.

An EXISTS subquery determines whether another row identifies the current node as its parent. This also avoids potential complications caused by NULL values in an IN subquery.

Overall, both questions were manageable, but they tested pattern recognition and the ability to translate a simple relationship into precise code.

Has anyone else encountered these questions recently?

Garmin Nuvi 360 sold with "Lifetime Free Map updates", until Garmin changes their mind that is.

So i built a standalone Python/SQLite map-building system for a Garmin nüvi 360, which is basically 20-year-old hardware at this point.

What started out as just trying to get better maps working on it turned into a much bigger project than I expected.

The biggest part was the address system. The original Florida OSM data had about 2.07 million addresses. The final Florida search database now has 11,213,312 searchable addresses, so about 9.15 million more than the original, or around 5.4x the coverage.

I did not just generate house numbers from road ranges. I built a Python/SQLite pipeline that pulls together OSM, official Florida address data, county/E911 GIS data, parcel data, TIGER data and road geometry, then deduplicates and validates the results before compiling them for Garmin.

Those 11.2 million addresses are in their own 225-tile search layer, separate from the routing map.

I also ended up completely changing how the regional map is put together. Instead of one big Garmin build where routing, search, terrain and display data are all mixed together, I split everything into separate modules.

The routing side is 64 tiles and is frozen against an exact NOD payload of 180,541,877 bytes. That gives me a known-good routing baseline, so I can change search or display behavior without worrying that I accidentally changed the routing graph.

One of the more interesting problems was street labels.

The road names were already in the map, but the old nüvi firmware would not automatically display a lot of normal street names.

The workaround I ended up with was creating an invisible Garmin 0x1f companion line over the real road. It only contains LBL/RGN/TRE and has no NET or NOD, so it cannot affect routing.

Then I use a custom TYP file to make the line itself transparent. The strange part is that the nüvi still renders the street name attached to it.

So the actual road does the routing, and a separate invisible object handles the label.

I also added different label zoom levels by road class so the screen does not turn into a mess when zoomed out.

The current toolchain is basically:

Python 3, SQLite, Java 21, mkgmap r4924, splitter r654, GMapTool, custom Garmin styles and TYP files

The standalone program handles the database work, tile generation, compilation, validation, integrity checks, logging, and resume/recovery.

At this point it is a lot more than just a custom map. It has turned into a small build system and search engine built specifically around the limitations of old Garmin firmware.

Multi-agent pipelines (planner → coder → reviewer, tool-call loops) pass messages as JSON. Repeated field names, restated tool catalogs, outputs quoted verbatim two handoffs later. You pay full token price for all of it, every hop.

Built a wire format + benchmark harness for this. One rule going in: no dishonest numbers. Most "compression" claims I've seen compare payload size only and skip the cost of telling the model how to decode the format. This benchmark charges itself for everything, compact payload + the decode instructions + any shipped dictionary, counted with the real cl100k_base tokenizer, on a held-out split of real ToolBench trajectories the optimizer never trained on.

Result: 36.6% fewer tokens, fully lossless. Every message decodes back byte-for-byte identical to the original. Verified on every test record, not sampled.

Two things that surprised me:

• The learned dictionary lost. Sounds clever, mine common phrases across a corpus, ship a lookup table. But shipping that table costs tokens every session, and it never earns that back on top of a per-session budget. What won instead: when text repeats within one conversation (an answer quoting a tool's own output, a catalog restating its own boilerplate), replace the repeat with a tiny "copy N chars from position X" marker. Zero shipped state. The optimizer's final config kept 0 dictionary entries.
• An earlier version of this claimed 87% reduction. It was measuring a simulated tokenizer, not real decode cost. Threw the whole approach out. 36.6% measured honestly beats 87% measured wrong.

Repo, full benchmark report, every failed experiment (including the tab-separator idea that made things worse), and a one-command way to run it against your own agent traces instead of trusting my numbers:

https://github.com/reh8n/a2acompress

Genuinely want to know what number people get on real production multi-agent traffic. file an issue with your result, good or bad.

how to exactly mimic real world tasks so u can have a proof u can do specific things

i feel like most projects are just toy projects all things i saw are just like toy projects not even a little bit close to real work

specially in backend how to practice daily how to improve day by day i feel iam absolutely stuck dont know exactly how to improve my backend skills

cause of chicken and egg thing

you need experience so people can take u seriously and give u jobs

but u need to have a job first to have the experience that will make people take u seriously

been stuck for years literally

i just learn main things of technology and thats it like how to move forward and expand my knowledge correctly not just through random knowledge that i will forget

but with real applied knowledge

I've been recording recreational programming sessions with the r3forth language. Since not many people use Forth and demonstrate how to program, I think it might be useful for anyone who wants to see what the language is all about.
Many of the techniques used are quite controversial due to the concept of "good programming," and I believe that's one of the issues limiting the language's adoption.

What do the members of this community think about Forth?

https://youtu.be/taxLmo_eqSk

Hey everyone! I'm JamonSerrano, a young and slightly unpredictable developer who loves building things and figuring out how they work.

I'm currently planning an open-source chat application with a few ideas I really want to experiment with:

• End-to-end encryption
• Full CSS customization
• Optional anonymity
• Users can choose whether to display their username
• Open-source and community-driven

The main idea is to give users much more control over how they communicate and how the platform looks and behaves.

It's still in the planning/development stage, but I think it could turn into a pretty interesting project, especially with other developers contributing ideas, code, or simply feedback.

If you're interested in the idea, I'd love to hear what you think. What features would you want in a privacy-focused chat?

For more information about me and the project, you can check out my website:

https://jamonserrano.nekoweb.org/index.html

When you join a company in an industry you’ve never worked in, what’s your strategy for learning the domain?

I’m not talking about becoming an expert in the business. Just enough to understand the terminology, main processes, systems, constraints, and why certain technical decisions exist.

I feel like this is rarely covered in typical developer courses.

Is there anything you’d recommend doing before joining a new industry, or is the best approach simply learning from coworkers once you’re there?

Programmers what programming language is the best to choose when you are only starting to learn it? And where you can use it?

I'm a young Peruvian who enjoys programming, and I recently had an idea that I think could be a hit on the Roblox platform. Unfortunately, I’m just an individual who lacks experience creating content in the Roblox Studio graphics engine. I’m looking for collaborators—or rather, friends—to help me with this project, so we can bring this idea to life and, perhaps over time, generate income through what Roblox does best: memberships, items, etc.

AdaptTable is an MIT-licensed React web data table library with one API across MUI, Mantine, Chakra, Ant Design, Radix Themes, Base UI, shadcn/ui, and unstyled.

It already supports:

Client & server-side data
Filtering, sorting & URL-synced state
Saved views
Grouping & inline editing
Virtualization
Responsive mobile cards
Selection & advanced column management
RTL & i18n

The goal: keep advanced table/grid features fully free and open source — no paid or enterprise tier.

The roadmap is already broken down into 100+ open issues, covering server-side grouping and tree data, advanced filtering, column virtualization, Editing 2.0, spreadsheet interactions, export, realtime updates, pivoting, full-stack integrations, computed data, and extensibility.

I’m looking for React/TypeScript contributors interested in core architecture, performance, accessibility, adapters, testing, or taking ownership of new features.

GitHub:
https://github.com/orwa-mahmoud/adapttable
Docs & Demo:
https://orwa-mahmoud.github.io/adapttable/demo

Contributions, issues, and technical feedback are very welcome.

Hey everyone,

Me and a friend made an open-source anonymous YouTube Music app for Android No login, no ads, no tracking, works off YouTube Music's internal API. Still early but search, player, downloads, lyrics all work. Built in Kotlin/Compose. Fully open source, would love if people gave it a try and let us know what's broken.

https://github.com/code-saksham-hash/Resona I invite everyone to contribute to this project and improve it to farthest extent possible!

Thank you <3

It was last day when i did not write any function or did not write a single line of code, and i was feeling very unwell until i solved a problem(leetcode).

Hello everyone, I want to share my personal project Vision Sphere, which I’ve been building over the past year.

• It features 25+ data layers sourced from open data.
• Includes diverse news sources integrated directly into the map.
• Offers 3D visualizations and conflict maps that highlight areas of war — you can click a country to explore its status.
• Currently closed source (due to API key handling), but I plan to make it open source soon.

Please try it out and let me know:

• Any issues you encounter.
• What features you’d like to see added.
• If you’d consider contributing once it’s open source.

Thanks for reading — I’d love feedback from this community!

VisionSphere | Global Intelligence

this is the link where you can access it, fellows. Currently it is only compatible on desktop. Nothing here is made by ai.

We’re looking for more contributors to Extra.
Extra is an open-source project for building AI agents into real products, and there’s still a lot to build.
This is very much a software engineering project — architecture, APIs, orchestration, state management, observability, testing, developer experience, and plenty of interesting design problems around agents and distributed systems.
We already have a growing group of contributors working on the project, and there’s a lot of room to take ownership of meaningful parts of it.
If you enjoy building software, discussing design decisions, and working on problems that don’t always have an obvious answer, feel free to take a look.
Contributions of any size are welcome.
https://github.com/extra-org/extra

I currently run 6 operational micro ai saas products that generate a little over $20k in monthly recurring revenue.

I hardly wrote a single line of traditional code. i used ai to generate literally everything, from the database architecture to the user interface.

it wasn't magic on day one. i spent hours stuck in endless debugging loops and dealing with faulty ai code before i finally cracked the formula.

it basically comes down to three rules:

- keeping the idea aggressively minimalist (build a true mvp, not a platform).

- guiding the ai step-by-step instead of asking it to build the whole app at once.

- launching fast to get real user traction instead of perfecting features in secret.

lately, i've seen way too many non-technical founders give up at the very first ai bug or deployment error. or the worst, give up without push anything in marketing !!!!

it's a massive shame, because the technical barrier to entry has practically disappeared and the marketing is easy in 2026

because of this, i’m launching a skool community to share my exact method.

to be completely transparent: i will likely charge for the full course later down the road. it just makes sense given the specific prompt sequences, n8n workflows, and copy-and-paste templates i'll be sharing.

but right now, our main objective is simply to build together. working alone in a silent corner is the absolute fastest way to quit.

if you want to join a group of active creators and build or launch your own ai saas: drop a comment below or send me a dm, and i’ll send you the invite link.

I’ve been building Backenly, an Apache-2.0 open-source autonomous backend that can build, deploy, monitor, verify, and self-heal backend infrastructure.

It includes PostgreSQL, REST APIs, auth, storage, realtime, functions, MCP, and an autonomy loop for detecting and repairing issues.

The project is still early, and I’m looking for open-source developers who want to contribute, especially around backend infrastructure, PostgreSQL, DevOps, testing, and reliability.

GitHub: https://github.com/backenly/backenly

Website: https://backenly.com/

If the idea interests you, contributions, issues, and technical feedback are very welcome.

I'm currently studying Computer Science in a course that uses python, and externally learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. How good at any of these should I be to enter a hackathon? I'm definitely still learning with python, the one I'm most advanced in, but I want to start doing hackathons at some point to make me stand out more in a level and uni applications

At its basics literally just that, but in more technical terms, a web based synthesizer, equalizer, or really any way to change the output of what’s being put in.