Best of Lobsters — November 2025

  1. 1
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·28w

    How I fell in love with calendar.txt

    A developer shares their experience adopting calendar.txt, a plain text file for managing calendar events using Unix command-line tools. They demonstrate how simple grep, vim, and bash aliases provide elegant solutions for viewing daily events, editing dates, and handling recurring events—all faster and more reliable than web-based calendar interfaces. The approach offers simplicity, trust, and personal customization through Unix tools, though mobile access remains challenging on proprietary systems like Android.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·27w

    Reimagine the Date Picker

    The creator of Pikaday, a popular JavaScript date picker library from 2012, has archived the project and transformed it into a guide advocating against calendar widgets. The new resource encourages developers to use native HTML date inputs or simpler alternatives, arguing that complex calendar UIs lead to errors and poor usability. The guide challenges the assumption that date pickers need elaborate JavaScript libraries, emphasizing user-friendly interfaces over technically accessible but complicated components.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·27w

    your project fucking sucks

    Open-source communities face pollution from low-effort, dishonest projects that prioritize marketing over substance. These "slop projects" mimic the aesthetics of legitimate open-source work with fancy websites, contribution guidelines, and roadmaps, but lack real problem-solving value. The author argues for cultural gatekeeping to preserve open-source values, distinguishing between beginner mistakes (acceptable) and dishonest performance (harmful). Red flags include AI-generated content, premature community scaffolding, tech-stack-focused descriptions, and projects announced before implementation. The solution is simple: build real things that solve actual problems, or be honest about learning projects.

  4. 4
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·28w

    AI's 70% Problem — Zed's Blog

    Addy Osmani from Google's Chrome team discusses the "70% problem" in AI coding: while AI tools can rapidly generate 70% of a solution, the remaining 30% involving edge cases, security, and production integration remains as challenging as ever. Despite over 30% of Google's code being AI-generated, trust in AI-generated code has declined from 70% to 60% in two years. The talk covers common pitfalls like the "two steps back" pattern where AI fixes create new problems, the reality that productivity gains are modest (1-2x) compared to hype, and code review becoming a new bottleneck. Osmani emphasizes that developers must understand and take responsibility for AI-generated code, especially junior developers who should use AI as a learning aid while maintaining curiosity.

  5. 5
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·27w

    Servo: A new web engine written in Rust

    Servo is an independent web rendering engine written in Rust, offering memory safety and parallelism advantages over traditional C++ engines. After Mozilla transferred it to Linux Foundation in 2020, Igalia revitalized the project in 2023. The engine now passes 92.7% of web platform tests, features a modern layout engine, and supports cross-platform deployment including Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and OpenHarmony. The project focuses on becoming production-ready with improvements in incremental layout, WebDriver support, SVG rendering, and DevTools. Servo aims to lead the embeddable web engine ecosystem while maintaining independence from big tech corporations.

  6. 6
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·28w

    I use Typst now

    Typst has become the primary writing format for technical education content across multiple output formats (HTML, PDF, slideshows). Key advantages include built-in bibliography support with Zotero integration, document querying capabilities for extracting metadata and structure, a scripting language for custom functions and styling, a package ecosystem, and hot-reload for both PDF and HTML targets. The HTML target remains experimental with some stability concerns, but the benefits outweigh migration risks for high-volume technical writers who need multi-format output.

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    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·27w

    5.0.0

    Homebrew 5.0.0 introduces parallel downloads by default, official Linux ARM64 support, and announces deprecation timelines for macOS Intel (Tier 3 by September 2026, discontinued by September 2027). The release removes macOS Gatekeeper bypass options, adds a new internal JSON API, and includes numerous improvements to brew commands including bundle support for Go packages, Alpine Linux package search, and enhanced cask functionality on Linux.

  8. 8
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·29w

    A prison of my own making

    A developer reflects on how adopting best practices like GitOps, immutable infrastructure, Kubernetes, and declarative systems turned their homelab from a relaxing hobby into an overwhelming burden. They realized that enterprise-grade tooling (NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, CI/CD pipelines) made simple tasks impossibly complex for a solo project. The author shares their decision to simplify by abandoning immutable distros, reducing automation, accepting stateful backups, and prioritizing ease of use over architectural purity.

  9. 9
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·28w

    This Month in Redox

    Redox OS, a Unix-like microkernel operating system written in Rust, made significant progress in October 2025. Major achievements include successfully launching Servo browser (with some limitations), porting htop and bottom system monitors, and upgrading to Rust 1.90.x. The RISC-V platform target reached tier 3 status in upstream Rust. New features include flexible device detection for ACPI/DeviceTree systems, dynamic keyboard layout configuration for PS/2 keyboards, and partial systemd service compatibility. The team also reimplemented the Cookbook package system in Rust with improved performance and a TUI interface. Numerous improvements were made across the kernel, drivers, networking, filesystem, and build system, along with ports of GitUI and GoAccess.

  10. 10
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·26w

    Mara: "#rustlang hot take: We should rename .unwrap() to…"

    A proposal to rename Rust's .unwrap() method to .or_panic() and .expect() to .or_panic_with() for better clarity. The argument is that 'unwrap' is misleading since related methods like .unwrap_or() and .unwrap_or_default() don't panic, making the naming inconsistent and potentially confusing for developers.

  11. 11
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·25w

    We Rewrote Our Startup from PHP to Gleam in 3 Weeks

    A startup successfully migrated their knowledge base management system from PHP/Laravel to Gleam in three weeks, despite no prior Gleam experience. The rewrite was motivated by personal preference for functional, statically-typed languages and Gleam's compilation to Erlang/BEAM. Key challenges included learning the use keyword and result module, decoding/encoding data types, and building a custom query builder. The migration simplified infrastructure by replacing Laravel queues with BEAM VM processes, and the system has run reliably in production for one month with zero issues.

  12. 12
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·27w

    Release v0.12 · perkeep/perkeep

    Perkeep 0.12 ships after a 5-year hiatus with major modernization: upgraded to Go 1.25, integrated Tailscale's tsnet library for private server deployment without public endpoints, migrated encryption from GPG to age, completed UI transition from GopherJS to native JavaScript, unified cloud storage backends (S3, B2, GCS), added container image distribution, expanded CI to macOS and Windows, and introduced comprehensive linting and testing improvements. The release includes contributions from 27 new contributors and removes deprecated features like AppEngine support and macOS FUSE.

  13. 13
    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·28w

    Why I don't love Rust (either)

    A detailed critique of Rust's design decisions from a developer who uses it regularly. Covers syntax inconsistencies, control flow complexity, error handling trade-offs, implicit closure captures, language bloat through intrinsics, unpredictable code generation, unsafe code semantics, async/await color problems, and ecosystem fragmentation. Argues that while Rust offers benefits over C++, it makes compromises that create friction in real-world systems programming.

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