Python dethrones JS as the main language on GitHub, Copilot supports different AI models and read results of lots of "state of" surveys.
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WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 140 - The Python Takeover 

Hello fellow developer, welcome back to a lot of survey results, sad news about JavaScript and how to get 50 developer job interviews in one month with AI. 

News and Articles

Well, it finally happened, due to the rise of AI, Python is now the top language on GitHub, dethroning JavaScript. The latter could also be split into two languages.

A lot of surveys results are out, like the State of the front-end, State of cloud security, State of AI and State of CSS. Josh W Comeau analysed the latter as did Geoff Graham on CSS tricks. Surveys still open that need your contributions are the State of React and the State of HTML.

Svelte 5 is out, and there are quite a few new things to look forward to in it. JetBrains released WebStorm and Rider as free for non-commercial use and Netflix moved their logged-out homepage from React to JavaScript cutting their time to interaction in half.

The big splash was in the AI space and most of it for developers. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says that a quarter of new code at Google is AI generated. OpenAI has a canvas ChatGPT interface tailored to writing and coding projects and Anthropic answered with their own JavaScript analyser. Simon Willison took a closer look at that one. Anthropic also has a new tool that can move the mouse cursor for you and showed some usage examples for that. The biggest splash was made by GitHub, opening Copilot to support various models and releasing GitHub Spark - a text to code tool.

Meta announced MovieGen, that can generate a movie from a single photo and Microsoft came up with AI employees.

On the flipside, Linus Torvalds claims AI is 90% marketing and 10% reality, ChatGPT's safeguards can be circumvented using hex encoding and Emojis and some even claim that Copilot is to blame for bad programmers.

Code and Tools

Native Masonry layouts have been on the wish list of web developers for a long time and now you can help choose the final syntax of it in CSS or discuss if it should be part of CSS grid. You can also boost rendering performance with a new CSS property called content-visibility. The Mallox ransomware was successfully decrypted and there is a great write-up of what happened in a Mallox attack. Microsoft shrunk their JavaScript monorepo git size by 94%.

HTML form validation is heavily underused and have you ever wondered about the difference between HTML’s dialog element and Popovers? More optimisation tricks can be found in using Node.js in enterprise environments and SQL tips and tricks.

Some tools for you: 

  • fdir - fast directory crawler & globber for NodeJS
  • ml.js - Machine learning tools in JavaScript
  • Node Version Audit - check the security of your NodeJS version.
  • Termshot turns console output into an image.

Cool code demos

antfarm
by

Virtual Ant Farm

Bicycle preloader

Talks and Videos

Fireside Chat with David Heinemeier Hansson

DHH on the creation of Rails and its influence on software development, the value of the open web and open source, cost-saving strategies like cloud exit, the shift towards buying software and remote work over office work. Check it out!

Other videos and talk write-ups of note:

  • Lucille Tachet - A Journey from Internal Tools to Public SDK (20m)
  • Andrei Epure - How to secure your .NET software supply chain (29m)
  • Daniel Kelly - Common Mistakes in Vue.js and How to Avoid Them (29m)

Work and Jobs

Someone got invited to 50 interviews by applying to 1000 jobs in 24 hours using AI whilst LinkedIn launches AI job recruiters. GenAI is not going to 10x computer programming, and what you work on beats how hard you work. There are interesting insights from 1500 1:1 meetings and good advice seems to be to write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.

Are you looking for opportunities or fancy a change? How about these?
  • Python Developer - Hybrid at Sartorius
  • AI Architect & Consultant at Riverty Group
  • Senior System Development Engineer  at CARIAD
  • Senior QA Engineer at TeamViewer Germany
  • Cloud Solution Architect at VECTOR Informatik
More jobs here: Remote positions - Germany - Austria

Some companies to check out are:

TeamViewer Germany - BWI - Televic GSP -  SD Worx - Arm 

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

  • $212 million to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks
  • All text in Brooklyn - finds text you enter in Google Street View images
  • Doubles - can you keep doubling numbers in a few seconds?
  • Fridgewall - make your mark

What's happening at WeAreDevelopers…

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WeAreDevelopers World Congress returns 9-11 July 2025. Secure your ticket with a 15% discount using code "devdigest"

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