Skip to content
360SOFTY
HomeInsights

Insights

Ideas for building
better software.

Engineering perspectives on architecture, product development, AI, and the everyday decisions behind useful software.

From the engineering desk

Browse practical articles or follow the latest technology updates.

Subscribe via RSS →

Curated links from external sources — not 360Softy original articles.

ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

A Deep Dive Into File Compression: How Data Gets Smaller, Why Codecs Differ, and What to Actually Use in the Lakehouse

Somewhere in your data platform right now, a single configuration property is quietly deciding a meaningful percentage of your storage bill, your query latency, and your compute spend. It is probably set to whatever the defaults were in 2019, nobody has looked at it since, and it is the compression codec. Compression is the most consequential invisible decision in data infrastructure. Every Parquet file in your lakehouse, every message crossing your network, every backup in your archive passed t

DEV CommunityRead original
ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

A Reader's Guide to My Books: Which One to Pick Up, Depending on What You're Building

The question I get most often after talks, after podcast episodes, and in newsletter replies is a simple one: where do I start with your books? It is a fair question, because the library has grown. Between the O'Reilly and Manning flagships and the self-published series, there are now more than fifty titles at books.alexmerced.com, spanning the data lakehouse, AI engineering, economics and philosophy, and even fiction. That is wonderful for depth and terrible for a first-time visitor staring at

DEV CommunityRead original
ExternalSoftware Engineering
GitHub Changelog

GitHub Code Quality license estimate in public preview

You can now see the number of active committers on repositories using GitHub Code Quality across your enterprise, giving you an estimate of your Code Quality license cost before it… The post GitHub Code Quality license estimate in public preview appeared first on The GitHub Blog.

GitHub ChangelogRead original
ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

The AI Supply Chain: The Next Evolution of Third Party Risk

Most enterprise security teams believe they have third party risk under control. They send out questionnaires, review SOC 2 reports, and negotiate vendor contracts. In the age of enterprise AI, this traditional approach is no longer enough. It is dangerously incomplete. The real risk has shifted from vendors to dependencies. We are moving away from legal agreements to neural weights, embeddings, retrieval pipelines, and agent frameworks. You can build a textbook Zero Trust architecture in AWS, b

aiawssecurity
DEV CommunityRead original
ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

Building a production AI agent in TypeScript with Mastra: a 2026 step-by-step.

Building a production AI agent in TypeScript with Mastra: a 2026 step-by-step. I spent an afternoon last month wiring up an AI agent in raw TypeScript using the Anthropic SDK directly. The code worked, but I owned every piece of it: the tool dispatch loop, the conversation history array, the retry logic. Around 400 lines before the agent did anything interesting. Mastra cuts that to about 60. A TypeScript-first agent framework with 24k+ GitHub stars, an active release cadence (88 releases as o

aitypescripttutorial
DEV CommunityRead original
ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

Disaster Recovery Drills That Actually Work

Most DR Drills Are Theater Someone schedules a meeting. A few senior engineers walk through a runbook. Everyone agrees "yes, we could do this" and marks it complete. Then the real disaster hits and nobody remembers the procedure, the runbook is 2 years out of date, and half the backup systems don't work. Real DR drills test whether your team can actually recover, not whether they can talk about recovery. Level 1: Tabletop Walk through a scenario on paper Identify missing runbooks Find ownershi

drreliabilitysre
DEV CommunityRead original
ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

SSG vs SSR vs CSR in Next.js: Choosing the Right Rendering Strategy for SEO

Is Next.js Really SEO-Friendly? Understanding SSG, SSR, ISR and CSR Thanks @opacedigitalagency for the valuable suggestion. While exploring this topic further, I researched how different rendering strategies in Next.js impact SEO, performance, and user experience. Many developers say: "Next.js is SEO-friendly by default." But the reality is more interesting. Next.js gives developers multiple rendering strategies, and the actual SEO benefits depend on choosing the right approach for the right t

seonextjswebdev
DEV CommunityRead original
ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

Your rules file only grows. Here's how to find the rules that do nothing

This is part 3 of a series on project rules for AI coding agents. Part 1 covered how Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex load your rules. Part 2 covered enforcing rules with hooks. This one covers the part almost nobody does: figuring out which of your rules are dead weight. Nearly every long-lived rules file I've seen has the same life story. It starts as five lines. An agent does something annoying, someone adds a rule. A bug slips through, someone adds a rule. Six months later it's 40 rules, and n

aidevtoolsproductivity
DEV CommunityRead original

Let’s start with a conversation

Tell us what you’re working on.

An idea, a challenge, or a system that needs to work better. We’ll help you understand the next step.

Discuss your project

Prefer email? [email protected]