WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 201: Don't stop thinking, AI Slop vs. OSS Security, rolling your own S3

Hello fellow developer, welcome to 2026 - we hope you had a good time celebrating the end of the year and recovered well. Let's start the year with the topic of AI and sustainability and some interesting tools to try out. Also look forward to some changes coming to the WeAreDevelopers site and offerings - more on that soon! 

Thorsten Jonas of the Sustainable UX Network wants to make sure that what we do with computers and storage doesn't kill the planet. We invited him at our Performance and AI day to dive deeper into the topic of AI and Sustainability and he had lots of interesting numbers to show and ideas how we can do our bit to make sure that our development offers don't wreck the only planet in our solar system we can live on.

What's happening in AI

• You Still Need to Think
• The Un-Dead Internet: AI catches irreversible ‘brain rot’ from social media
• Time saving / time wasting
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust AI Coding Agents
• Bitter lessons building AI products

Security and Privacy

• On AI Slop vs OSS Security
• Introducing Aardvark: OpenAI’s agentic security researcher
• Hackers Use NFC Relay Malware to Clone Tap-to-Pay Android Transactions
• Making A Virtual Machine Look Like Real Hardware To Malware
• The scariest “user support” email I’ve ever received

Software Development

• Inlining Critical CSS: Does It Make Your Website Faster?
• Using A Hidden Submit Button To Ensure Unnamed Submissions
• How We Saved $500,000 Per Year by Rolling Our Own “S3”
• The renaissance of written coding conventions: Because AI reads manuals, too
• How Memory Maps (mmap) Deliver 25x Faster File Access in Go

Tips, Tricks and Tools

• Am I online?
• RegExp Equivalence Checker
• FFmate is an automation layer built on top of FFmpeg
• Microsoft Edit - a simple editor for simple needs.
• JSON Crack The open-source JSON Editor.

Procrastination corner and Wonderful Weird Web

• World Map of Human Ideas
• Pointer pointer - explanation how it is done
• Guardian headlines that are also haiku

• “Your” vs “My” in user interfaces
• How to Be an Open Source Hero: Contributing AI-Generated Code with Care
• Sometimes the Best Accessibility Fix is a Usability Fix
• Architectural debt is not just technical debt
• Always Be Ranking

Companies:

• Senior Data Engineer at Dennemeyer Group
• Senior Frontend Engineer (Angular) at Riverty
• Duales Bachelorstudium: Wirtschaftsinformatik at ALDI DX
• Frontend Engineer - React at Douglas
• Senior Backend Engineer Electrical Engineering at envelio

More jobs here: Remote positions - Germany - Austria