🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #443

It's Thursday! Just one more day until the weekend!

#WhereIsMyTrain - This is the pre-Jio era when internet adoption was still low in India - and there comes Where Is My Train - a mobile app that accurately predicted the location of your train in India - and this is a story of how the app gained traction and grew - to eventually be acquired by Google for $30+ million. An inspiring read.

#Microsoft - Rumours suggest that Microsoft is preparing for another round of layoffs - close to 22,000 of them - in the first quarter. Microsoft has historically targeted layoffs for January and July, marking the post-holiday period and fiscal year start respectively. The most at-risk jobs in the company are middle management, Azure Cloud Operations, gaming/Xbox, sales and non-core engineering.

#ChatGPT - New data suggests that ChatGPT is losing its market share to Gemini on the web. Gemini surpassed the 20% share benchmark, while Grok surpassed 3% and is approaching DeepSeek.

#BugBounty - HackerOne's Internet Bug Bounty program is a crowdfunded bug bounty program. The program encourages researchers and maintainers to find and fix vulnerabilities in open source software. And they pay them in return. This one time though they didn’t - not until it captured the news media’s attention that forced HackerOne to finally pay this researcher for their work.

Zepto Launches In-app UPI Payments
Quick commerce platform Zepto has rolled out native in-app UPI payments, allowing users to complete transactions directly within the app, reducing payment friction and checkout time, and following similar moves by Swiggy and Zomato.

Amazon Pay Expands Into Investment Segment, Allows Users To Invest In Fixed Deposits Directly Through App
Amazon Pay is a digital payment service by Amazon, popular in India for its UPI-based payment services. It's now allowing users to invest in fixed deposits (FDs) directly through its app, making it a convenient option for small investors.

Motorola Unveils Its First Side-foldable Smartphone, The Razr Fold
Motorola, a company known for its innovative flip phones, has just announced its first side-folding smartphone, the Razr Fold, with a 6.6-inch external screen and an 8.1-inch flexible main display, supporting the Moto Pen Ultra stylus and featuring a robust camera system with Dolby Vision recording capabilities.

Spotify - Introduces Listening Activity and Request to Jam features for seamless music sharing and collaborative listening experiences.

WhatsApp - Member tags to identify roles in group chats.

Roblox - Introduces mandatory age checks for all users, prioritizing user privacy and safety.

ChatGPT - Introduces ChatGPT Health, a dedicated experience for secure and personalized health information and conversations.

A workshop on how to use Claude’s Codeing Agent effectively. Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic introduces the Claude Agent SDK, designed to build autonomous agents that go beyond simple chat to execute actions like writing scripts and editing codebases. He explains the evolution from single LLM features to complex workflows and agents that manage their own context. The workshop covers design principles like the "Swiss cheese defense" for security and features live coding to demonstrate prototyping agents for real-world tasks like issue triaging.

Soumaya Erradi compares Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright for end-to-end testing. Selenium offers broad language support but can be slow. Cypress focuses on developer experience with automatic waiting but is limited to JavaScript. Playwright provides cross-browser support and speed, making it a rising favorite. The choice depends on specific project needs, language preferences, and complexity.

Bhuvaneswari Subramani details the evolution of Agentic AI through seven patterns: conversational clients, contextual search, RAG, self-correcting RAG, function calling, agents with MCP, and agent-to-agent interaction. She showcases tools like Nova Act and the Model Context Protocol to streamline software development by integrating complex tools into natural language workflows.

Sonner - A Case Study Of A Notification Library Made Popular By ShadCN
This article discusses the design and implementation of Sonner, a popular toast library used by companies like Cursor, X, and Vercel. You will learn about the importance of naming, the use of CSS transitions and animations, and the techniques used to create a stacking effect and swipe gesture in the library.

AI Is Forcing Us To Write Goode Code
A startup, Logic Inc, is pushing the boundaries of AI-driven coding with strict guidelines and investments in agent-friendly code.

10 Ideas For 2026
Thinking is the foundation of everything we do and, for most of us that foundation has many cracks. Here are 10 ideas to consider in 2026. These ideas are not for everyone, but useful for some.