Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I/O '26 Recap: Everything You Need to Know     Google processes 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month.  It now has 13 products with over a billion users each.  Google's new model Gemini Omni can create anything from any input. It combines Gemini's intelligence with the best of its generative media models for a new level of World understanding, multi-modality and editing. Software engineering at the tipping point Build core skills to thrive as an AI-era developer     Three fourth of all code at Google is written by AI. What's new in the Gemma open model family    What's new in Chrome Create advanced data driven Gemini API apps Unlock modern web capabilities in your AI coding workflows   Build your website for the agentic era   Vibe design to build incredible web UI Elevate the Chrome Extensions developer experience   Break boundaries with Gemini in Chrome DevTools   A fireside chat on the evolution of the developer craft

This Week I Learned -  *  web.py was originally published while Aaron Swartz worked at reddit.com, where the site used it as it grew to become one of the top 1000 sites according to Alexa and served millions of daily page views. Reddit was rewritten using other tools after being acquired by Condé Nast in 2006. * Markdown is used widely by websites including Reddit, GitHub and Discord using it, as well as LLMs such as Claude using it to format the files that store accumulated memories. * Grok Build is xAI's coding agent for the terminal, serving as a direct competitor to Claude Code and the OpenAI Codex CLI. * Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months.  * Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% t...

In HTML, an image can use a backup source with the onerror event. The browser first tries to load the main image from src. If that image is missing, blocked, or fails to load, onerror runs and replaces it with a fallback image.  <img   src="actual-image.jpg"   alt="Product image"   onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='backup-image.jpg';" > The JavaScript code  this.onerror=null   prevents an infinite loop if the backup image also fails. That prevents an endless loop if the backup image also fails. Without it, the browser could keep triggering onerror again and again. This technique is useful for product images, profile photos, brand logos, or any place where a missing image should show a placeholder instead of a broken image icon. For instance, this Dynamic Dummy Image Generator can be used to generate placeholder images of desired dimensions. For multiple responsive image options, use <picture>, but that is for format/viewport fallb...

This Week I Learned -  * GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a free donation-supported hosted service or self-hosted app. It is a privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo. *  MotherDuck  is a collaborative serverless analytics platform that lets you query and analyze data in cloud databases and from cloud storage, using your browser or any of the DuckDB APIs.  * Cloudflare has built its own version of WordPress that solves some security issues with the older CMS—it’s called EmDash. * Apple reported an 84% first-quarter rise in new apps on its App Store, putting it on a pace to surpass 2025’s 600K apps.  * Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! - Andrew Ng * The Batch - As OpenAI prepares to discontinue the Sora app and API, ByteDance added Seedance 2.0, its multimodal video generator, to its popular video-editing app CapCut - the s...

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has long been the ultimate launchpad for aspiring developers. As Google’s premier global open-source program, it offers contributors the rare opportunity to work on live open-source software projects alongside some of the world’s most respected and seasoned developer communities. But as open-source engineering continues to take center stage globally, getting a foot in the door has evolved from a difficult challenge into an elite competitive arena.   The scale of this competition was fully on display for the GSoC 2026 cohort. Globally, the program saw a massive influx of 15,245 applicants , all vying for a coveted spot. Out of those thousands of hopefuls, only 1,141 contributors were selected worldwide. This places the global acceptance rate at a razor-thin ~7% , a metric that makes GSoC more selective than many Ivy League institutions. Open Food Facts & GSoC For the contributors who do beat the odds, they get to write code that directly ...

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned -  * Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all reported impressive quarterly earnings on Wednesday, surpassing Wall Street expectations thanks to booming demand for AI and cloud services. AI continues to be the main growth engine, with the four companies projected to invest around $650 billion in AI infrastructure this year. * SpaceX & XAI will provide Anthropic with access to Memphis-based Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers, to provide additional capacity for Claude. The supercomputer is powered by 220,000+ NVIDIA GPUs. * Palo Alto Networks, a US-based cybersecurity firm, is set to acquire AI infrastructure startup Portkey to strengthen its AI security stack for enterprise use of autonomous agents, at twice its estimated $60–70 million valuation. * Portkey’s AI gateway sits between applications and large language models, helping companies monitor, manage and secure AI traffic. Palo Alto Networks plans to fold...

GitHub has experienced explosive user growth in recent years, particularly accelerating in 2025. The platform crossed 100 million developers in 2023 and reached over 180 million developers by late 2025, with more than 36 million new developers joining in 2025 alone—equating to roughly one new developer every second. This rapid expansion, further amplified by AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot, has driven significant increases in activity: hundreds of millions of pull requests, nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (up 25% YoY), and surging repository creation and API usage. Impact on Availability This hyper-growth has strained GitHub’s infrastructure, leading to multiple high-impact outages and degraded performance in early-to-mid 2026. GitHub’s own engineering leadership has publicly acknowledged that rapid load growth, architectural coupling between services, and challenges in handling large-scale workloads (including monorepos and AI-driven automation) have caused cascading issues. A ...

GitHub Copilot is moving to usage‑based billing on June 1, 2026, where token consumption (input, output, cached) directly affects costs. To optimize tokens, you need to reduce unnecessary context, use caching, and structure prompts efficiently. 1 2 3 4 5 How Copilot Uses Tokens Input tokens → what you send (code, prompts, context). Output tokens → what Copilot generates. Cached tokens → reused context (cheaper than new input). Context loading (files, repo, history) often consumes 80–90% of tokens, not the generated code itself. 5 Practical Strategies to Optimize Token Usage 1. Control Context Aggressively Avoid opening large/unrelated files while prompting. Limit selection scope before asking Copilot. Exclude build, log, and generated files at the enterprise level (e.g., /target/**, *.class, *.xml). 4 2. Break Tasks into Micro‑Operations ❌ Bad: “Refactor entire microservice.” ✅ Better: “Refactor this method to use reactive pattern.” Smaller scope = fewer files scanned = fewer tok...

This Week I Learned -  * AI is influencing not only how fast code is written, but which languages and tools developers use. -  Octoverse 2025   *  GitHub Copilot CLI for Beginners -  * Apple's Support app update v5.13 accidentally included CLAUDE.md files , which are configuration documents used to guide Anthropic's Claude Code AI coding assistant on codebase architecture and rules. Apple quickly released v5.13.1 to remove the files, exposing a rare view into their use of third-party AI tools for app development while highlighting a build process oversight at the highly secretive company. * Claude sometimes refuses or postpones work based on inferred time/context, possibly to manage token limits, avoid rushed outputs, or simulate thoughtful behavior. * As A.I. makes the production of knowledge work more and more efficient, the job of presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring or just plain selling the work appears to be rising in importance. ...