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🧪 The 15-Second Coding Test That Eliminated Half of Applicants

🧪 The 15-Second Coding Test That Eliminated Half of Applicants

What AI can’t replace, when microservices hurt, and why React updates matter

January 20, 2026

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Welcome to Full Stack Focus. 👋

Here’s everything you need to know this week in the world of full-stack development- from AI agents reshaping workflows to concrete guidance for your career and stack choices.

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Programming

📈 GitLab 18.8 GA: AI Agents Across the Dev Lifecycle
GitLab has officially released GitLab Duo Agent Platform, bringing agentic AI orchestration across planning, building, security, and shipping - not just code generation. The platform bundles foundational agents (planner, security analyst, data analyst) that can automate stages like backlog prioritization, vulnerability triage, or even merge request analysis within GitLab’s context. This matters because it addresses what many teams struggle with: AI speeding coding but not solving delivery bottlenecks.

🛠 The Complete Full-Stack Developer Roadmap for 2026
A new curated guide highlights what full-stack developers should focus on this year - from mastering core web concepts to deeper JavaScript/TypeScript skills and modern backend patterns. It emphasizes understanding concepts like async/await, event loops, scope, and language fundamentals over just frameworks.

🧪 I’m a former CTO. Here’s the 15-second coding test I used to filter out 50% of applicants
Hiring remotely isn’t about getting more candidates anymore - it’s about filtering out bad ones. A former CTO shares a ridiculously simple coding question that’s faster to solve in your head than to paste into an interpreter or AI. The result? Roughly half of applicants failed by blindly trusting tools, while strong engineers answered correctly almost instantly. It’s a fun, slightly uncomfortable reminder that basic reasoning still matters, even in the age of AI-assisted coding.

Front-End

⚡ What Programming Looks Like in 2026 (Front-End Perspective)
Discussion is resurfacing around how full-stack and “full-cycle” roles are evolving - blending deep frontend craft with backend fluency, deployment responsibility, and even data workflows. It’s a useful snapshot of how the developer job itself is changing, not just the tools.

☁️ Astro is joining Cloudflare
Astro - the framework behind a huge chunk of today’s fast, content-driven sites - is officially joining Cloudflare. The big news: Astro stays open-source (MIT), portable, and community-driven, but now gets first-class backing from Cloudflare’s platform and tooling. Astro 6 is already in public beta, bringing a brand-new Vite-powered dev server, production-parity local runtimes, and live content collections without rebuilds. If you care about fast-by-default sites, island architecture, and simpler frontend stacks, this partnership is a strong signal Astro is here for the long haul.

🌎️ Introducing the <geolocation> HTML element
Chrome 144 introduces a new <geolocation> HTML element that changes how sites request location access. Instead of triggering permission prompts from JavaScript, location requests are now explicitly user-initiated, reducing silent blocks and broken flows. It also cuts a ton of boilerplate - you just drop in the element and listen for a location event. Early tests showed higher success rates and fewer permission errors, making this a big quality-of-life win for location-based UX.