Week 17, 2025 - Compressed Colors
Short edition after a short week. It’s spring break in the school of my daughters, so I spent more time with family and less time with everything else. It was worth it — for example, Chloé started teaching me how to paint with aquarelle! You can see the very first result above.
This week on my Engineering Manager challenges series, I wrote about something I faced multiple times during my career: working with a brilliant engineer who needs to understand the importance of soft skill development. Check it here if you missed it.
🤔 Articles that made me think
A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List
Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned, and overall security expert, has been phished! The irony of the incident is actually a great way to spread the truth that with the right combination of circumstances, anyone can be a victim. Click over to read details of his story. I love the transparency — this is the best approach during a security incident. About phishing: I wish more websites would invest in implementing passkeys instead of that lazy “let me send you a link to log in” workaround. Passkeys are the only widely available and accessible phishing-resistant authentication method that I know of, and I can’t wait to see them implemented on more sites. Now that modern password managers support passkeys, you're not even tied to a platform anymore using them.
What do you Prioritize when Prioritizing?
John Cutler explains the all-too-familiar feeling of talking above each other during prioritization discussions, but then provides a useful framework to break down what exactly the discussion is about when prioritizing. He identifies four distinct areas that require different approaches, making the process much more systematic and approachable.
Vibe Coding Exploration
Zachary Cohn, an experienced product / engineering leader, documents his vibe-coding experiments. From 0 to a working prototype in a few hours, getting stuck on a bug for days, sneaky hallucinations and unexpected refactorings, it’s all there. Plus, some interesting ideas around solving small businesses’ unique code problems: an experienced engineer comfortable with AI-assisted coding spending a day or two to understand a concrete business friction, and putting something together in a few hours that provides immediate value for those who otherwise couldn’t afford custom developments.
🎹 Something cool: 549 Notes
An ex-colleague of mine explains how they managed to fit a 549-note melody, together with visualization, into a 256-byte DOS executable file. The results look cool, but the mind-blowing part is going through the slides of their presentation to follow all the tricks they had to use to cram everything into 256 bytes.
256-byte intros are an extreme category in Demoscene competitions. Here’s another deep dive into the details of one of the most famous examples of sizecoding.
I started programming on a Commodore 64 when I was a teenager, and it eventually meant having to understand and write assembly. One of my proudest coding achievements was to understand and implement an animation using raster interrupts, and reading through ern0’s presentation made me nostalgic for those times.
That’s it for today, pick up a hobby this weekend,
Péter