Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Web

The Node Package Manager (NPM) supply chain attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and widespread, despite progress in addressing the issue. Microsoft's ownership since 2020 has done little to alleviate concerns, with an almost decade-old open security hole remaining unaddressed. NPM has become a "bad actor" in the software development ecosystem, posing risks to companies and individuals relying on it.

The choice of ORM is a critical decision for project development, impacting both speed and future maintenance. Active Record and Data Mapper are two primary patterns, each with its own philosophy and characteristics. A new approach, SQL-first, exemplified by Drizzle ORM, prioritizes pure SQL, offering a Query Builder strongly typed to write queries resembling SQL.

This article provides a tutorial on creating a particle effect with dynamic colors using CSS filters and keyframe animations. Due to browser limitations, the author overcomes the HSL-to-RGB conversion limit by utilizing CSS custom properties to dynamically calculate background color on every frame. The effect is further enhanced with twinkling variations.

Node-RED and BleuIO are combined to create a BLE air quality dashboard that sends commands to a BleuIO dongle, scans for HibouAir device advertisements, decodes real-time data, and displays it on a live dashboard. By following the tutorial, users can build a working setup to monitor indoor air conditions and receive alerts when CO2 levels exceed safe thresholds.

A recent analysis of handling JavaScript dates provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and best practices for production applications. It emphasizes storing and comparing dates in UTC, validating every date input, and converting timestamps to local time only when rendering to the user, offering practical advice for reliable date logic.

The WFGY project offers a comprehensive framework for fixing errors and improving AI model performance, providing a "semantic firewall" against potential problems. The project comprises various modules, including a diagnostic and symbolic fix framework, a failure tree, and pipelines, with a focus on modular fixes and layer-based symbolic reasoning.

A developer solved cluttered production consoles by creating a reusable JavaScript debugging utility with a centralized logging system that automatically silences logs in live environments. The enhanced logger features different severity levels and ensures certain messages remain active while others are production-guarded, promoting consistency throughout the application codebase.

Subtle animations can enhance user experience by simulating smooth motion using physics concepts, creating a lifelike feel on websites. A step-by-step guide is provided to achieve a liquid background hover effect for a menu, using Solid, JavaScript, and GSAP animations, resulting in a natural movement of the background when hovering or leaving a link.

A Kotlin developer shares a cautionary tale about subtle errors in coroutine and Flow-based server-side applications, specifically Server-Sent Events (SSE). An SSE endpoint worked fine in local dev and staging but failed in production due to incorrect use of `return@collect`, leading to resource leaks and memory issues.

A team migrated from a custom design system to Tailwind CSS, improving debugging, reducing PR reviews, and speeding up development with pre-designed components and utility classes. By auditing styles, setting up a custom config, and migrating isolated components first, teams can reap benefits of consistent styling, faster iteration, and reduced overhead.

A malicious line of code was discovered in popular NPM package "error-ex", evading detection due to obfuscation. The discovery led to a build failure investigation, ultimately uncovering cryptocurrency-stealing malware. This incident highlights the fragility of software supply chains, emphasizing the need for development teams to prioritize security through tools like npm ci and regular dependency audits.

The author's experience with type safety in their Next.js frontend and Express API reveals challenges sharing types between a monorepo. Initial struggles stemmed from CommonJS and ESM module system differences, but solutions using shared packages, Zod schemas, tRPC, and open-source code generation from OpenAPI specs resolved these issues, achieving end-to-end type safety.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that certain psychological persuasion techniques can trick large language models into responding to "forbidden" prompts, mimicking human responses found in training data through patterns and cues like social proof and scarcity. This phenomenon is attributed to LLMs' ability to mimic human behavior, not consciousness.

The Serverless CDK Hackathon 2025 invites participants to build innovative serverless applications using AWS CDK, focusing on real-world problems. Participants must submit a public GitHub repository and demo video showcasing their project utilizing Lambda, API Gateway, and AppSync. Prizes range from ₹15,000 to ₹5,000, with winners announced on October 30, 2025, based on judging criteria.