Modern CSS features, LLM data formats, and polishing UI

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Welcome, Developers! 👋

Explore modern CSS custom functions & logic, surprising LLM data format research results, practical UI animation techniques, Vercel vs Cloudflare philosophies, and engineering strategy for company influence. And don't forget the unordered links!

From our sponsor: Ampere Computing

Ampere Performance Toolkit - now on GitHub!

Set up, run, and repeat performance tests practically, consistently, and predictably with Ampere’s Performance Toolkit (APT) - whether running on bare metal or in the cloud.

With APT you can seamlessly provision, prepare, run, clean up, and teardown many common benchmark tests.

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🔖 The Reading Room

Articles we have hand-picked for you:

What You Need To Know about Modern CSS

Chris goes through newer CSS features in 2025, including new custom @function, conditional if(), and the powerful shape() function. Key updates also address UI interaction with Popovers, auto-sizing fields, typography enhancements (text-wrap), advanced easing via linear(), and controlled focus navigation via reading-flow.

By Chris Coyier

Which Table Format Do LLMs Understand Best?

Popular data formats performed worse than expected in LLM comprehension tests. CSV achieved only 44.3% accuracy while JSONL hit 45%, both significantly trailing lesser-used formats like XML (56%) and YAML (54.7%). The findings challenge common assumptions about optimal data formatting for AI systems.

By Improving Agents →

7 Simple Tricks to Make Your UI Animations Feel More Polished

User interfaces should provide instant feedback on every interaction to feel truly responsive. Adding a subtle scale-down effect (0.97) on button press makes interfaces feel instantly more responsive and alive. Combined with more tricks, these micro-interactions compound to create interfaces where everything feels right.

By Emil Kowalski →

Vercel vs Cloudflare: Two Philosophies of Building for Developers

Vercel and Cloudflare aren't just competing on features, they're competing on philosophy. Vercel optimizes for confidence and creative velocity, making infrastructure invisible. Cloudflare optimizes for control and guarantees, exposing every metric. The arguments never resolve because they're each measuring developer value in completely different currencies.

By Bharath Natarajan →

How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

Engineers don't have to be powerless in company politics. The key is timing your technical proposals to align with organizational priorities. Keep a backlog of valuable projects ready and pitch them when executives need solutions for their current focus areas - whether it's reliability, performance, or developer experience.

By Sean Goedecke →

⏳ Back in Time

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🔗 The Link Lounge

Unordered finds from around the web:

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🧰 The Toolbox

Tools and products we're excited about today:

Jules API

The Jules API automates software development tasks using asynchronous coding agents. Developers launch sessions based on code sources to build custom bots that fix bugs, triage backlogs, and generate fixes programmatically via API calls.

Learn more →

QJS

QJS is a CGO-Free JavaScript runtime for Go, built with QuickJS and Wazero. It securely executes modern JavaScript, offering fast execution and zero-copy interoperability between Go data and JavaScript environments.

Learn more →

Toybox

Toybox is a single multicall binary providing a swiss-army-knife collection of essential Linux command line utilities such as cp, mv, and cat. It is highly configurable for lightweight system building.

Learn more →

WebUtils

WebUtils.io provides over 52 free, client-side web utilities covering development, design, images, and security. Processing occurs instantly in your browser, ensuring a fast experience that requires no sign-up and guarantees user privacy.

Learn more →

Ampere Performance Toolkit - now on GitHub!

Set up, run, and repeat performance tests practically, consistently, and predictably with Ampere’s Performance Toolkit (APT) - whether running on bare metal or in the cloud.

With APT you can seamlessly provision, prepare, run, clean up, and teardown many common benchmark tests.

Get the APT

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