Issue no.16: Trust the process
Figma’s editorial newsletter about how products take shape—and shape our world.
CSS vs. JavaScript
There are a bunch of JavaScript animation libraries out there, and you might have wondered whether there’s a performance cost compared to traditional CSS transitions and keyframe animations. In this blog post, we’ll compare the same animation across several different strategies and see the differences firsthand. There’s some interesting nuance here!
SilverTorch: Index as Model — A New Retrieval Paradigm for Recommendation Systems
We’re introducing SilverTorch, a reimagining of recommendation systems that unifies all retrieval components for user generated content under a unified architecture. SilverTorch shows up to 23.7x higher throughput compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. It’s also showing 20.9x more compute cost efficiency compared to a CPU-based solution while also improving accuracy. Our research paper, “Sil
GitHub for Beginners: Getting started with Git and GitHub in VS Code
Discover how to use VS Code to interact with GitHub and maintain your projects.
Your Prototype Is Not Being Honest With Your Users (And Here’s How To Fix It) — Smashing Magazine
There’s a moment in almost every usability session where a participant pauses at the login screen, types something, and glances up: checking whether they’re “doing it right.” That pause is a clear sign. They’ve already clocked that this isn’t a real app, and every data point collected after that moment is filtered through that awareness.
Introducing Nova, our internal platform for coding agents
Nova lets engineers run multiple coding sessions in parallel and lets internal systems use AI agents as part of automated workflows.
7 tips for using Figma Make credits more efficiently
While everyone’s talking about “tokenmaxxing,” we’ve compiled seven best practices to help you build smarter—without prompting more—in Figma Make.
What matters when anyone can build
If AI can make anyone a product builder, the real edge is knowing what’s worth shipping.
GitHub recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise AI Coding Agents for the third year in a row
We are committed to empowering every developer by building an open, secure, and AI-powered platform that defines the future of software development.
Four Levels Of Customer Understanding — Smashing Magazine
What people say, feel, think, and do are often very different things. To understand the underlying reasons for user behavior, it helps to look beyond the surface and explore hidden motivations, root causes, and the different layers of reality that shape how people act. Brought to you by Measuring UX Impact, **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.
Agentic Programming
Vibe Coding
Beyond the engine: 10 open source projects shaping how games actually get made
Check out these 10 open source tools that help game developers create art, animation, levels, audio, dialogue, debug UIs, and engine-ready assets.
Building GitHub’s next chapter in accessibility
Explore our update on GitHub’s accessibility strategy, and learn how you can join us in building a culture of accessibility.
Advanced Tree Counting: Mathematical Layouts With sibling-index() And sibling-count() — Smashing Magazine
Meet `sibling-index()` and `sibling-count()`. Staggered cascade effect in one line of CSS without `:nth-child()` rules or JS workarounds. Works for 5 items or 5,000.
Investigation update: GitHub Enterprise Server signing key rotation
GitHub Enterprise Server customers need to take immediate action.
Announcing Claude Managed Agents on Cloudflare
Cloudflare has integrated with Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents to provide a fast, isolated execution environment for autonomous code delivery. This means builders can scale agent workflows globally while strictly controlling access to private backends and easily customizing their agent’s tools and runtimes.
From Stream Processing to the "PostgreSQL Village": A Marketer's Journey to PGConf.de
Discover the unique community DNA of PostgreSQL as a former Apache Flink event manager shares insights from PGConf.DE 2026.
A new chapter: Friends of Figma’s brand refresh tells the story of a global community
From São Paulo to Seoul, Friends of Figma chapters around the world are distinct, vibrant, and locally rooted. Our new brand gives them a more authentic way to express themselves.
Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us
In recent weeks, we pointed Mythos and other security-focused LLMs at live code across critical parts of our infrastructure. We share what we observed, the models’ strengths and weaknesses, and what the work around them needs to look like before any of it can scale.
Take your local GitHub sessions anywhere
Kick off work in VS Code or the CLI, finish it from your phone. Remote control for GitHub Copilot sessions is now generally available on github.com and GitHub Mobile.
Building a general-purpose accessibility agent—and what we learned in the process
Learn about the experimental general-purpose accessibility agent that GitHub is piloting.
Raising the bar: Quality, shared responsibility, and the future of GitHub’s bug bounty program
We’re updating our bug bounty program standards to prioritize quality submissions, clarify shared responsibility boundaries, and evolve how we reward low-risk findings.
Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
Ten Data-Backed Truths Of User Experience ROI — Smashing Magazine
Every extra second of friction has a measurable business cost. Carrie Webster shares ten data-backed UX facts that link user experience directly to revenue, retention, and long-term growth.
Interrogatory LLM
GitHub availability report: April 2026
In April, we experienced 10 incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.
From latency to instant: Modernizing GitHub Issues navigation performance
How the GitHub Issues team used client-side caching, smart prefetching, and service workers to make navigation feel instant.
Dungeons & Desktops: 10 roguelikes that never die (because their communities won’t let them)
Roguelikes don’t die. They fork, mutate, get argued over, rewritten, abandoned, and revived again. Sometimes all at once.
Reel Friends: Building Social Discovery that Scales to Billions
On its face the new Friend Bubbles feature looks simple enough. It highlights Reels your friends have watched and reacted to. But sometimes the features that seem the most straightforward require the deepest engineering work. On this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Pascal Hartig chats with Subasree and Joseph, two software engineers from the Facebook […]
Practical Interface Patterns For AI Transparency (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine
Why traditional loading patterns like spinners fail in agentic AI experiences, and how interface patterns that reveal the system’s process, status, and decision-making can improve transparency and build user trust.
When "idle" isn't idle: how a Linux kernel optimization became a QUIC bug
We investigated a bug where CUBIC's congestion window became pinned at its minimum floor, causing a performance to plummet. The fix involved correctly measuring idle periods to distinguish RTT wait times from actual application idleness.
The Path to Data Sovereignty: CYBERTEC and SUSE Unite for Open Source
This blog post talks about the partnership between CYBERTEC and SUSE which offers a pre-validated part for users. Read to know more!
What the design-to-code loop unlocks
With work moving more fluidly between code and canvas, workflows aren’t just changing—they’re converging.
What Is Code?
Code has two distinct but intertwined purposes. It is a set of instructions for a machine, and it is also a conceptual model of the problem domain. A well designed codebase is a representation of the vocabulary of a domain. These abstractions reveal themselves only as developers build the software. Programming languages act as thinking tools, enabling the construction of a conceptual model that su
GitHub Copilot individual plans: Introducing flex allotments in Pro and Pro+, and a new Max plan
Starting June 1, our lineup of individual plans will update based on your feedback.
Dungeons & Desktops: Building a procedurally generated roguelike with GitHub Copilot CLI
Learn how one Hubber used GitHub Copilot CLI to build an extension that turns any codebase into a unique, roguelike dungeon.
Migrating Data Ingestion Systems at Meta Scale
Meta’s data ingestion system, which our engineering teams leverage for up-to-date snapshots of the social graph, has recently undergone a significant revamp to enhance its reliability at scale. Moving from our legacy system to our new architecture required a large-scale migration of our entire data ingestion system. We’re sharing the solutions and strategies that enabled […]
We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations—and it scaled (2026) - Shopify
How we used SKIP LOCKED, composite primary keys, and connection visibility to hit our scale targets.
GitHub for Beginners: Getting started with OSS contributions
Learn how to find opportunities to contribute to the open source community.
Labyrinth 1.1: Making End-to-End Encrypted Backups Even More Reliable
We’re rolling out version 1.1 of Labyrinth, the encrypted storage system and protocol that secures messages and history on Messenger. Labyrinth 1.1 enhances the reliability of end-to-end encrypted backups with a new sub-protocol that helps messages survive the loss of a device, a switched device, and long gaps between sign-ins. Read our updated white paper, […]
Five vertical SaaS insights from Sessions 2026
AI is forcing platforms to expand beyond pure software. See how vertical SaaS platforms are using payments, financial services, and agentic commerce to build more durable businesses.
How Superset built the IDE for AI agents on Vercel
Why age assurance laws matter for developers
Youth safety requirements are moving down the tech stack to operating systems and app stores—raising new questions for open source developers.
How researchers are using GitHub Innovation Graph data to reveal the “digital complexity” of nations
Researchers share in an interview how they used GitHub data to predict GDP, inequality, and emissions in ways that traditional economic data misses, along with our Q4 2025 data release.
Building For The Future
This afternoon, we sent the following email to our global team. One of our core values at Cloudflare is transparency, and we believe it's important that you hear this directly from us because it’s a major moment at Cloudflare.
How Cloudflare responded to the “Copy Fail” Linux vulnerability
When a critical Linux kernel privilege escalation was publicly disclosed, Cloudflare's security and engineering teams detected, investigated, and mitigated the threat across our global fleet, confirming zero customer impact and no malicious exploitation.
Improving token efficiency in GitHub Agentic Workflows
Agentic workflows that run on every pull request can quietly accumulate large API bills. Here’s how we instrumented our own production workflows, found the inefficiencies, and built agents to fix them.
Agent pull requests are everywhere. Here’s how to review them.
A practical guide to reviewing agent-generated pull requests: what to look for, where issues hide, and how to catch technical debt before it ships.
Google’s Prompt API
Mat Marquis on Google pulling the web standards equivalent of U2 album marketing:
Nordic Cool Meets Parisian Chic Vlog: Two PGDays, One Week
This blog talks about the vlog series and the episode showcasing the Nordic Pgday 2026 and pgDayParis. Read to know more.
Validating agentic behavior when “correct” isn’t deterministic
How to build the “Trust Layer” for GitHub Copilot cloud agent without brittle scripts or black-box judgements by using dominatory analysis.
The Architecture Of Local-First Web Development — Smashing Magazine
An honest perspective on building local-first web apps in 2026, written for developers who’ve been doing this long enough to be skeptical of silver bullets.
Mythical Man Month
Welcome to Maintainer Month: Celebrating the people behind the code
What maintainers are telling us, what we’ve shipped, and how to celebrate the people behind open source.
From SSH to REST: A Security-Driven Modernization of Slack’s EMR Data Pipelines
Excerpt By 2024, Slack’s data platform had accumulated 700+ SSH-based operators orchestrating critical data pipelines. We’re talking daily search indexing that processed terabytes of data, analytics jobs powering business intelligence, the whole shebang. Every single one of these jobs required direct SSH access to production AWS Elastic MapReduce (EMR) clusters. We had a massive security…
Rethinking The Experience Of System Tools — Smashing Magazine
Design always starts with function — function shapes form. But if that function can’t be made completely invisible and people still have to interact with it, it inevitably becomes part of their experience. In this article, Kyrylo Levashov shares four common software design assumptions.
How KIKO Milano scales for Black Friday
PGKeeper: Building the bouncer we needed for Postgres
This is the story of why and how we built PGKeeper, a scalable and reliable service to support Figma’s rapidly growing products and database workload.