😵 Open Source Cursor?

Hey there.

Welcome to Full Stack Focus.

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

Programming

📈 Advancing from Senior to Staff Engineer
In his blog post, Nitin explains that the jump from Senior to Staff Engineer is a shift in mindset, not just more technical work. He suggests focusing on making others better, unblocking teams, and tackling organizational problems over individual code contributions. He also emphasizes the need to lead without authority, communicate effectively with leadership, and make behind-the-scenes work visible, treating the role as a fundamentally different job.

☕️ How Netflix runs on Java
Netflix uses Java heavily in 2025. The platform now leans heavily on Spring Boot, gRPC, and GraphQL (via DGS) to power over 3000 services. All staying current with the latest JDK and frameworks. They're exploring generational ZGC, Virtual Threads, and even native images to optimize performance. This video breaks down the full tech stack.

😴 Programming Myths We Desperately Need to Retire
Amrit Pandey’s wrote a great blog on how real programming isn’t clean, it’s messy, and that’s what keeps businesses running. The shiny code and perfect best practices? They rarely survive in the real world. Old tech like Java, PHP, and C++ still rules, no matter how loud the buzz is around new tools.

🧠 How Cursor Indexes Codebases Fast
Cursor, the AI-powered IDE with $300M ARR, uses Merkle trees to speed up code indexing. These trees help track changes efficiently, making searches and updates faster. This blog breaks down how Merkle trees work, why they chose them, and the technical hurdles they faced during implementation.

😲 New open-source AI IDE (like cursor)
Void is an open-source alternative to Cursor, letting you run AI agents on your codebase, track changes, and use any model locally, without storing your data.

AI won't take over coding. Developers who know how to leverage AI will.

Here's how to level up your dev skills with AI:

• Sign up for AI by Devs. The AI newsletter built by developers, for developers.

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Start coding smarter with AI by Devs.

Front-End

🥱 Frontends are hard
Modern frontends like Next.js, Svelte, and Astro are surprisingly hard to deploy, often needing platforms like Vercel or Netlify with custom infra just to make them work smoothly. This blog explains why major cloud providers struggle with these frameworks, and how SST is now evolving to support them more effectively.

👍️ An added benefit of Server Components
This post clears up a common misconception: React Server Components (RSCs) aren’t a rulebook, they’re a tool for flexibility. You don’t have to run a server or fetch data on it; RSCs just let you choose where and when your code runs. Server, client, or both, at build-time or runtime.

It’s a new model that can feel strange at first, but once understood, it opens up powerful architectural choices that go beyond traditional CSR or SSR.

🗄️ Robust Data Fetching Architecture For Complex React/Next.js Apps
In this blog, the author shares how using a 'Three Layers of Data' architecture in React/Next.js helps avoid common data-fetching problems like duplicate requests, stale data, and tangled loading states. They walk through 11 common pitfalls, from race conditions to broken optimistic updates, and explain how this structured approach keeps apps fast, clean, and scalable, even as complexity grows.

More Tools & Stories

🤔 There’s no need to over engineer a URL shortener.

🛠️ How Node.js works behind the scenes

⚖️ Why Kleinanzeigen.de Picked Astro Over Next.js

AI

🌐 Introducing web search on the Anthropic API

🗣️ Making complex text understandable with LLMs

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

- Full Stack Focus team :)