🧑‍💻 The Job Interview That Almost Hacked Me

A fake LinkedIn recruiter, a repo, and hidden malware.

Author

Journals GG
October 20, 2025

In partnership with

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Programming

👋 Why we're leaving serverless
Unkey rebuilt its API from Cloudflare Workers to stateful Go servers, cutting latency by 6× and simplifying a once-complex serverless setup. The switch solved major issues with caching, data pipelines, and performance bottlenecks caused by serverless limitations. The result: faster, self-hostable, and platform-independent APIs. The post also explores when serverless shines, and when it becomes a burden.

🧑‍💻 How I Almost Got Hacked By A 'Job Interview'
David Dodda nearly ran server-side malware hidden in a polished take-home coding test from a convincing LinkedIn recruiter. The attack used a realistic company profile, a professional repo, and urgency to push him to run code; the remote payload URL vanished after 24 hours. He only caught it after asking an AI assistant to scan the code, which revealed obfuscated code that fetched and executed a remote script with full Node privileges. Bottom line: always sandbox unknown code, verify recruiters/companies, and scan before you run.

💥 The Great Software Quality Collapse
An Apple Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM shows how far software quality has collapsed, bugs that once caused crises now barely make headlines. Apps like VS Code, Chrome, and Discord leak massive memory while companies throw billions at infrastructure instead of fixing fundamentals. AI tools amplify bad code, erasing the next generation of skilled developers. The author warns: physics, not funding, will end this era of careless engineering.

🥸 The Majority AI View
Most people actually building AI technologies, engineers, PMs, and developers, see LLMs as useful but massively overhyped. Inside the industry, there’s a quiet consensus: AI should be treated like any other tool, not a revolution or religion. Yet this moderate view is silenced by fear of backlash and mass layoffs, while billionaires dominate the narrative. The author urges the public to realize most tech workers reject the hype and simply want responsible, balanced use of AI.

Front-End

✅ Improving the trustworthiness of Javascript on the Web
JavaScript cryptography remains risky because compromised web apps can secretly leak private data. To fix this, Cloudflare and others propose WAICT, a W3C-backed system bringing integrity, consistency, and transparency to web apps without central authorities. It uses hash-based manifests and public logs so browsers can verify code authenticity like app stores do. The goal: make secure, auditable cryptography possible in browsers at web scale.

✒️ Build forms with React and shadcn/ui
shadcn released a new guide on building forms using React and shadcn/ui. It walks developers through choosing a framework and integrating their preferred form library with shadcn’s components. The guide aims to make creating consistent, accessible, and styled forms simpler across different React setups.

📺️ The Future of React
Theo shared insights from React Conf in a video on the future of React, highlighting its shift to a new React Foundation run by multiple major companies instead of Meta. He sees this as a move toward stability and shared governance for the ecosystem. Theo also touched on server components, view transitions, React Router updates, and async rendering, signaling a more open, incremental, and community-driven future for React.

🥟 Bun 1.3 is HUGE
Bun 1.3 is the runtime’s biggest release yet, evolving into a full-stack JavaScript platform. It now includes a built-in dev server with hot reloading, native MySQL and Redis clients, and improved routing, cookies, and WebSockets. The update also adds workspace enhancements and stronger Node.js compatibility, marking a major step toward making Bun the go-to tool for both frontend and backend apps.

AI

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

- Full Stack Focus team :)