🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #408

Happy Thursday! One day closer to the weekend!

#Cognizant - Cognizant, the IT services company, has started tracking employee laptop activity, marking them as "idle" after just 5 minutes of no work! Some employees are freaking out, saying it's an invasion of privacy, especially since they had to sign up for it during mandatory training. Company says the move is meant to monitor productivity on certain projects. Many employees are concerned about privacy and trust.

#BestApp2025 - Google Play Best of 2025 winners were announced. The awards celebrate apps, games and books that impressed Google with their brilliance, ingenuity and quality.

#Meta - Meta has released a 3D data engine that can be used to annotate 3D images. It's basically RLHF for 3D reconstruction. They're already shipping it in FB Marketplace.

Karnataka Launches Keo: India's First State-built AI Pc To Bridge Digital Divide
Karnataka's Department of Electronics, IT, and BT has introduced KEO, a compact, affordable, and AI-driven personal computer designed and developed entirely in the state, aiming to bridge the digital divide and promote inclusive education and economic participation.

Postmortem: Cloudflare Network Outage Triggers
On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare's network experienced a significant failure, causing widespread errors and disruptions to its customers' sites. The outage was caused by a database system permission change that led to a feature file being generated with an unexpectedly large size, causing the software to fail. The issue was later resolved, but not before impacting core CDN and security services, Turnstile, Workers KV, Dashboard, and Email Security.

Mastodon Founder Eugen Rochko Steps Down After Decade At The Helm
Mastodon is a decentralized social network that uses the ActivityPub protocol to connect independently managed servers, giving users more control over their data and online experience. Rochko, the founder and CEO, is leaving to focus on his mental and physical health after nearly a decade at the helm, and will receive a one-time payment of one million euros in recognition of his efforts.

Zoho One - Upgraded to be a Unified System with AI-Driven Intelligence, Redesigned UX, and Deeper Integrations Across 50+ Applications

Drishti Jain's DjangoCon US 2025 talk demonstrates how Python empowers climate research. She highlights libraries like NetCDF4, Rasterio, and ClimateLearn for modeling trends, processing satellite imagery, and forecasting energy. Jain urges developers to leverage these open-source tools and practice carbon-aware computing to actively contribute to sustainability efforts.

Muskan Paliwal argues for using unsafe Rust to achieve order-of-magnitude performance gains (10x-30x) in production . She introduces the PEBE framework (Profile, Exhaust, Benchmark, Evaluate) to justify its use and advocates for the Isolation Pattern - wrapping unsafe cores with validation layers and safe APIs - proven by tools like Apache Arrow and Crossbeam.

Manish Sinha demonstrates using Pydantic and Pydantic AI to validate and manage LLM outputs in production. He contrasts Pydantic with other validation libraries, explaining its Rust-based core and performance benefits. Sinha then walks through a real-world use case: an agent that automates attaching email threads to Netsuite ERP records by parsing incoming webhooks into Pydantic models and using an LLM to summarize the conversation, ensuring structured, type-safe data handling throughout the process.

Windows AI Overhaul
Microsoft is integrating a variety of AI agents directly into the Windows 11 taskbar. It’s part of a broader overhaul of Windows to turn the operating system into an “agentic OS.”

Programming Principles For Self Taught Front End Developers
For newly graduated programmers, learn actionable principles like "The Rule of Three" that helps write better code by generalizing repeated functionality after three implementations, avoiding over-engineering and premature optimization.

AI Is Writing Your Code But Who Is Reviewing It
The AI coding revolution speeds up development, generating "AI slop" - bloated, buggy code lacking architectural foresight, increasing technical debt. To govern this, a new wave of AI-powered code reviewers, like CodeRabbit, are emerging. These tools act as automated senior developers, ensuring quality and security, and can learn a team's specific standards. The future involves an "agentic SDLC" where specialized AIs collaborate (generation and review), shifting the human developer's role from coder to architect and quality overseer.