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Year 2026

1,048 articles published in 2026.

AI & ML — Friend Bubbles: Enhancing Social Discovery on Facebook Reels

Friend Bubbles: Enhancing Social Discovery on Facebook Reels

Friend bubbles in Facebook Reels highlight Reels your friends have liked or reacted to, helping you discover new content and making it easier to connect over shared interests. This article explains the technical architecture behind friend bubbles, including how machine learning estimates relationship strength and ranks content your friends have interacted with to create more […]

CWChris Wiltz·March 18, 2026AI & ML
Engineering — Introducing the Machine Payments Protocol

Introducing the Machine Payments Protocol

We’re launching the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard, internet-native way for agents to pay—co-authored by Tempo and Stripe. Businesses on Stripe can accept payments over MPP in a few lines of code using our PaymentIntents API.

JWJeff WeinsteinJeff Weinstein·March 18, 2026Engineering
SRE & Ops — Ranking Engineer Agent (REA): The Autonomous AI Agent Accelerating Meta’s Ads Ranking Innovation

Ranking Engineer Agent (REA): The Autonomous AI Agent Accelerating Meta’s Ads Ranking Innovation

Meta’s Ranking Engineer Agent (REA) autonomously executes key steps across the end-to-end machine learning (ML) lifecycle for ads ranking models. This post covers REA’s ML experimentation capabilities: autonomously generating hypotheses, launching training jobs, debugging failures, and iterating on results. Future posts will cover additional REA capabilities. REA reduces the need for manual interv

CWChris Wiltz·March 17, 2026SRE & Ops
AI & ML — Implementing Hybrid Semantic + Lexical Search

Implementing Hybrid Semantic + Lexical Search

Semantic search alone wasn't good enough. Here's how I improved search on kentcdodds.com through three rounds of iteration with Cursor and GPT-5.4, each time learning something that the previous design missed.

KCKent C. DoddsKent C. Dodds·March 16, 2026AI & ML
Frontend — Patch Me If You Can: AI Codemods for Secure-by-Default Android Apps

Patch Me If You Can: AI Codemods for Secure-by-Default Android Apps

Even seemingly simple engineering tasks — like updating an API — can become monumental undertakings when you’re dealing with millions of lines of code and thousands of engineers, especially if the changes are security-related. Nowhere is this more apparent than in mobile security, where a single class of vulnerability can be replicated across hundreds of […]

CWChris Wiltz·March 13, 2026Frontend
Frontend — Moving From Moment.js To The JS Temporal API — Smashing Magazine

Moving From Moment.js To The JS Temporal API — Smashing Magazine

The way JavaScript handles time has evolved significantly, from the built-in `Date` API to Moment.js and now Temporal. The new standard fills gaps in the original `Date` API while addressing limitations found in Moment and other libraries. Joe Attardi shares practical “recipes” for migrating Moment-based code to the new Temporal API.

JAJoe AttardiJoe Attardi·March 13, 2026Frontend
Security — AI Security for Apps is now generally available

AI Security for Apps is now generally available

Cloudflare AI Security for Apps is now generally available, providing a security layer to discover and protect AI-powered applications, regardless of the model or hosting provider. We are also making AI discovery free for all plans, to help teams find and secure shadow AI deployments.

LRLiam Reese, XmflsctLiam Reese, Xmflsct·March 11, 2026Security
Systems — Simplifying Containers with Cloudflare Sandboxes

Simplifying Containers with Cloudflare Sandboxes

How I replaced a long-lived Cloudflare Container with a one-shot Cloudflare Sandbox, deleted most of the control-plane code, and let an agent do the heavy lifting in less than an hour of my own time.

KCKent C. DoddsKent C. Dodds·March 11, 2026Systems
Engineering — Quick Hit #107

Quick Hit #107

Font Awesome are launching a Kickstarter campaign to transform Eleventy (11ty) into Build Awesome.

DSDaniel SchwarzDaniel Schwarz·March 9, 2026Engineering
Engineering — The Value of z-index

The Value of z-index

How we look at the stacking order of our projects, how we choose z-index values, and more importantly, the implications of those choices.

ASAmit SheenAmit Sheen·March 9, 2026Engineering
Engineering — Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare

Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare

How I moved Call Kent podcast episode processing off my primary Fly.io app server and onto Cloudflare Queues and Containers: what broke, what I missed, and whether it was worth the complexity.

KCKent C. DoddsKent C. Dodds·March 9, 2026Engineering
Security — How Advanced Browsing Protection Works in Messenger

How Advanced Browsing Protection Works in Messenger

We’re sharing the technical details behind how Advanced Browsing Protection (ABP) in Messenger protects the privacy of the links clicked on within chats while still warning people about malicious links. We hope that this post has helped to illuminate some of the engineering challenges and infrastructure components involved for providing this feature for our users. […]

CWChris Wiltz·March 9, 2026Security
Design & UX — Persuasive Design: Ten Years Later — Smashing Magazine

Persuasive Design: Ten Years Later — Smashing Magazine

Many product teams still lean on usability improvements and isolated behavioral tweaks to address weak activation, drop-offs, and low retention – only to see results plateau or slip into shallow gamification. Anders Toxboe updates persuasive design for today’s reality, clarifying what has actually held up over the last decade.

AAnderstoxboeAnderstoxboe·March 9, 2026Design & UX
Engineering — Quick Hit #106

Quick Hit #106

A new version of Chrome will be released every two weeks (instead of four) starting from September 2026.

DSDaniel SchwarzDaniel Schwarz·March 6, 2026Engineering
AI & ML — Human Strategy In An AI-Accelerated Workflow — Smashing Magazine

Human Strategy In An AI-Accelerated Workflow — Smashing Magazine

UX design is entering a new phase, with designers shifting from makers of outputs to directors of intent. AI can now generate wireframes, prototypes, and even design systems in minutes, but UX has never been only about creating interfaces. It’s about navigating ambiguity, advocating for humans in systems optimised for efficiency, and solving their problems through thoughtful design.

CWCarrie WebsterCarrie Webster·March 6, 2026AI & ML
Engineering — How Automatic Return Routing solves IP overlap

How Automatic Return Routing solves IP overlap

Automatic Return Routing (ARR) solves the common enterprise challenge of overlapping private IP addresses by using stateful flow tracking instead of traditional routing tables. This userspace-driven approach ensures return traffic reaches the correct origin tunnel without manual NAT or VRF configuration.

SWSteve Welham, Lauren JoplinSteve Welham, Lauren Joplin·March 5, 2026Engineering
Performance — A QUICker SASE client: re-building Proxy Mode

A QUICker SASE client: re-building Proxy Mode

By transitioning the Cloudflare One Client to use QUIC streams for Proxy Mode, we eliminated the overhead of user-space TCP stacks, resulting in a 2x increase in throughput and significant latency reduction for end users.

KUKoko Uko, Logan PraneisKoko Uko, Logan Praneis·March 5, 2026Performance
Engineering — Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism

Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism

This article reflects on an ideological discomfort with software patents, a direct experience of patent aggression in the software industry, and the practical constraints faced by startups. It argues that while the patent system remains deeply flawed, defensive patenting can function as a shield in an asymmetric legal environment, especially for open-source innovators.

NJNaresh Jain·March 5, 2026Engineering
Databases — Always-on detections: eliminating the WAF “log versus block” trade-off

Always-on detections: eliminating the WAF “log versus block” trade-off

Cloudflare is introducing Attack Signature Detection and Full-Transaction Detection to provide continuous, high-fidelity security insights without the manual tuning of traditional WAFs. By correlating request payloads with server responses, we can now identify successful exploits and data exfiltration while minimizing false positives.

DDanieleDaniele·March 4, 2026Databases