💼 Hiring in Tech Is Broken, Here’s the Fix

Hey there.

Welcome to Full Stack Focus. 👋 

Here’s everything you need to know this week in the world of full-stack development.

Your network is hiring. You just don’t know it yet.

Indy AI by Contra helps you find opportunities through your existing network. It connects to LinkedIn and X, then quietly surfaces warm opportunities. No cold outreach. No job boards. No feed fatigue. Just opportunities that find you.

Let work find you

Programming

💼 An engineer's perspective on hiring
This post lays out Why hiring in tech feels so broken, and what could actually fix it. From dismissing top‐tier Rust and Haskell devs who stumble under stress to wasting cycles ghosting candidates. It argues for smarter interviews: ones that truly differentiate genuine talent, reflect real job tasks, respect candidates’ time, and predict long-term fit.

⛈️ Keep API Work Local: Why Offline-First Beats Cloud-Based Tools?
This post lays out how cloud-based tools like Postman can stall when servers fail, leak sensitive data, or drift from live endpoints, whereas offline-first tools keep specs, tests, and docs safely version-controlled alongside your code. It argues that this setup is faster, more secure, and free of distractions like per-seat fees or clunky UIs.

💢 Read That F*cking Code!
AI can speed up your coding, but only if you actually read what it produces. This post calls out the risks of blindly shipping AI-generated code and lays out three common traps developers fall into. It also offers two practical, battle-tested workflows for integrating AI into real projects without sacrificing quality.

🔎 How To Review Code
Too often, reviews fix syntax but miss the bigger picture. Matthias Endler digs into what really matters: ensuring changes align with the system’s architecture, pushing for maintainable naming, and knowing when, and how, to say no. He also emphasizes the human side: clear communication, running the code, iterative feedback, and turning reviews into learning moments.

Front-End

💪 HTTP is not simple
Behind HTTP’s familiar surface lies a tangle of hidden complexity. In this post, Daniel Stenberg, bringing nearly three decades of HTTP experience and IETF involvement, peels back the layer of simplicity that tools like curl and raw text commands mask.

🚄 We were shipping >500KB of React to show a landing page. Here's how we fixed it
A Reddit user discovered their site was shipping over 500 KB of React just to display a static landing page, and decided to fix it. Instead of ditching React entirely, they introduced Astro for purely static content and kept React only where interactivity was needed. The result: a lighter, faster site without a full rebuild.

🤖 Agentic loop control for full-stack AI applications
Vercel just launched AI SDK 5, a TypeScript-first toolkit wrapping chat, agents, speech, and more into one unified workflow. The update delivers end-to-end type safety across frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, and Angular, plus powerful new capabilities: agentic loop control, speech generation/transcription, tool enhancements, a global provider API, raw-response access, and built-in support for Zod 4 validation.

😢 We replaced passwords with something worse
Daniel Huang blasts the “email + 6-digit code” login flow, calling it worse than traditional passwords. He warns that attackers can easily trick users into entering codes on phishing sites, bypassing safeguards like password managers. Plus, this trick has already been exploited in the wild, particularly in Microsoft’s Minecraft login system.

🤗 Friends at Last: Tailwind & CSS
Tailwind CSS and native CSS are finally playing nicely. On That HTML Blog, the author explains how you can now embed Tailwind design tokens directly into standard CSS, no more leaning on @apply. It’s a shift that makes working with utility-first frameworks feel more integrated and flexible.

AI

🤔 GPT-5 Released: What the Performance Claims Actually Mean for Software Developers

♟️ OpenAI's o3 Crushes Grok 4 In Final, Wins Kaggle's AI Chess Exhibition Tournament

🥇 Why Your AI Never Works on the First Try

🐔 How AI is helping advance the science of bioacoustics to save endangered species

More Tools & Stories

👐 OpenAI open weight models now available on AWS

📈 The Unsustainability of Moore’s Law

Have a great week, see you the same time next week!

- Full Stack Focus team :)