🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #323

Cheers to Thursday! The weekend is almost here!

#YouTube-Labs - Did you know that YouTube premium users get to also test out new features for YouTube before they get released (AND get rewarded for it?). Anyway, the latest feature to test seems to be threaded comments. Check it out if you have Premium YouTube.

#Github-UTurn - Another Did you know - That Github has a command palette? Neither did most folks - until Github announced that they will sunset the feature due to “low usage”. That riled many developers who discovered the feature and blamed Github for not documenting the feature well and turning off the feature by default - so much that Github decided to NOT remove that feature just yet. We too came to know of it through this announcement and tried it out - and we must say it does make navigation around Github much easier and quicker. We agree with the angered developers - why was this not marketed much by Github?!

Paypal Now Supports UPI
PayPal, a leading digital payment platform, is launching "PayPal World", a global digital wallet that enables users to shop, send, and receive money across borders with ease. They have partnered with National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) to offer UPI Payments. This means that you can now shop at any US or Canada store that supports Paypal - and pay with UPI.

Ola Electric Shifts To Ferrite Magnets In EVs
Ola Electric, an Indian electric vehicle manufacturer, is switching to ferrite magnets in its new electric vehicle models to reduce dependence on heavy rare-earth materials and mitigate global supply disruptions.

Apollyon Dynamics Delivers Indigenous Uavs To Indian Army
Students of BITS Pilani Hyderabad founded a company that specializes in design and manufacturing of custom unmanned aerial systems for defence and surveillance needs, focusing on reliability and adaptability to terrains and missions. They recently delivered UAVs to Indian Army units in various locations, showcasing their ability to innovate and make a national impact.

Gupshup Raises $60m, Keeps New Valuation Under Wraps
Gupshup, a business messaging startup that began its journey in India over two decades ago and became a unicorn four years ago, has raised a new over $60 million round.

Microsoft Sharepoint Hack Exposes US Nuclear Weapons Agency
Microsoft's SharePoint software has been exploited by Chinese hacking groups, affecting over 50 organizations, including the US National Nuclear Security Administration, which provides nuclear reactors for US Navy submarines. Despite the breach, no sensitive information was leaked.

Gemini - Introduces simplified Firebase backend services integration and deployment, along with new collaboration features and Gemini CLI open-source terminal utility.

Lumo - From the makers of ProtonMail, Lumo is a private AI assistant with no logs kept, encrypted chats, and no data sharing or selling.

Meta - Added new safety features to DMs in Teen Accounts, including prominent display of account join date, safety tips, and block and report options.

Google OSS Rebuild - Empowers security teams with declarative build definitions, SLSA Provenance, and build observability tools for PyPI, npm, and Crates[dot]io packages.

Google Photos - Adds AI-powered photo-to-video and Remix tools for creating short clips and transforming photos into different styles.

Shruti Kapoor | Ex-Slack & PayPal Staff Engineer on React 19, AI for Devs & the Power of Tech Confs - The speaker shares her experiences using AI in development, the importance of accessibility, her preference for TypeScript, and offers advice for aspiring developers and conference speakers.

Anshika Koul | Kotlin Multiplatform's Cross-Platform Brilliance at Norway's National Postal Service - How did Norway's postal service, with a 400-year-old legacy, modernize its chaotic software? Discover how they used Kotlin Multiplatform to centralize business rules, slash development time from months to days, and make their developers happier. This is a masterclass in taming a complex system.

Devansh Tandon | Teaching Gemini to Speak YouTube: Adapting LLMs for Video Recommendations to 2B+DAU - Ever wonder how YouTube decides what video you'll watch next? A Google engineer reveals how they're teaching their AI, Gemini, to understand YouTube's massive video library. Discover "Semantic ID," the new language that turns videos into tokens, and see how LLMs are revolutionizing recommendations for billions of users.

Why reliability is hard at scale: learnings from infrastructure outages
This article digs into what happens when things go wrong at large-scale infrastructure providers. Last month, several well-known companies in this segment suffered widespread outages, and engineering teams later shared postmortems of what went wrong, and what they learned.

Webassembly Adoption Patterns
WebAssembly (Wasm) turns 10 this year, which, in software terms, just about brings it to the age of majority. Wasm has found a niche but not yet filled its habitable space. This article attempts to inventory the early Wasm wins and losses and identify winning (and losing!) patterns. It then goes further to extract commonalities between these patterns and predicts the future.

Font Size Adjust
Recent addition to CSS, font-size-adjust property, helps maintain font size consistency across different fonts, making it useful for multi-font web pages.