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You may have already read in the news that on the eve of Cosmonautics Day, a new stable release of Angie 1.9.0 was released, an nginx fork that continues to be developed by the team of former nginx developers. Approximately every quarter, we try to release new stable versions and delight users with numerous improvements. This release is no exception, but it's one thing to read a dry changelog and quite another to get to know the functionality in more detail, to learn how and in which cases it can be applied.

The list of innovations that we will discuss in more detail:

— Saving shared memory zones with cache index to disk;
— Persistent switching to a backup group of proxied servers;
— 0-RTT in the stream module;
— New busy status for proxied servers in the built-in statistics API;
— Improvements to the ACME module, which allows automatic obtaining of Let's Encrypt TLS certificates and others;
— Caching TLS certificates when using variables.

How Does a Developer Realize They Need a Browser Auto CAPTCHA Extension?

Imagine a developer automating routine tasks — for example, testing a web application or writing a data scraping script. Everything runs smoothly until a CAPTCHA appears on the path. In the browser, a familiar window pops up: "I am not a robot," or a grid of images where you need to find traffic lights or pedestrian crossings. The automatic script halts, tests fail, and an inexperienced developer might not even realize the problem for a long time — after all, they set everything up and started it, but didn’t account for the presence of CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), designed precisely to stop bots. But what if the bot is ours and performs, say, useful work?

Would you like to know which indexes are used frequently or rarely? Which ones aren't used at all? Which tables and indexes are the largest? It's very easy to create visualizations for this. They're both visually appealing and practically useful.

If you work with PostgreSQL, you've likely run into performance issues at some point — especially as your database grows. Things may have been running smoothly at first, but as your client database expanded, queries started slowing down. Sound familiar? Here's a guide to help you identify and fix problematic queries, so you can get your PostgreSQL database running at peak performance again.

I’ve recently been playing with Agent Mode in VS Code, which looks promising. If you’re using VS Code and want to give your development a turbo boost, you’ll want to hear about this.

We continue our journey through the world of CAPTCHAs (Fantastic CAPTCHAs and Where to Find Them, as well as Methods to Combat Them), and today we encounter yet another “tough nut” in the CAPTCHA universe – FunCaptcha (Arkose Labs).

FunCaptcha is a type of CAPTCHA developed by Arkose Labs that offers users small puzzles instead of the usual tasks like recognizing distorted text or selecting images containing buses. In traditional CAPTCHAs (e.g., reCAPTCHA), verification often relies on recognizing distorted characters or simple images. Arkose Labs took a different route: their “entertaining” CAPTCHAs feature interactive challenges with 3D objects, logic puzzles, and audio questions. This approach is intended to be user-friendly for humans while complicating life for bots.

Typical FunCaptcha challenges include:

This article is based on the experience of developing the memsafe library, which, using the Clang plugin, adds safe memory management and invalidation control of reference data types to C++ during source code compilation.

When creating an app or any other software product for children, one of the hardest parts of the process is conducting user research correctly. Although working with kids might seem fun and entertaining, it takes certain skills to get them engaged in testing your product and voicing their opinion so you could gather all the necessary information. It’s important to understand that mentally kids function differently than adults, so working with a young target audience requires a different approach. Treating children like adults in the UX research process can lead to serious mistakes: they might not get a proper understanding of your product and you might end up getting wrong results, only wasting your time and budget. In order to avoid that, we’ve collected a few tips below that might help you communicate with kids more effectively for a productive and fruitful research session.

Imagine a familiar situation: it’s Monday morning, tasks are piling up, and you need to quickly spin up a new service using Postgres Pro. Or maybe you’ve just upgraded your database server over the weekend — added more CPUs, more RAM.

Here’s how to get your database tuned and ready to make the most of the new hardware and workload, without wasting time.

DBAs often struggle to identify the most resource-hungry processes that degrade system performance. Back in 2017, DBA — and now Postgres Professional engineer — Andrey Zubkov faced the same challenge. This led him to develop pg_profile for PostgreSQL, which has since evolved into pgpro_pwr.

In this article, we’ll dive into strategic database monitoring and show you how to pinpoint bottlenecks in your databases using our tools.

We continue to follow the news about PostgreSQL 18. The January CommitFest brings in some notable improvements to monitoring, as well as other new features.

You can find previous reviews of PostgreSQL 18 CommitFests here: 2024-07, 2024-09, 2024-11.

Hi, my name is Ilia. I founded Perfect Wiki — a SaaS product for creating internal company knowledge bases that works directly within Microsoft Teams. We created a simple and convenient tool for storing, editing, and sharing knowledge within companies. It all started with the idea to resolve one specific pain point: the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams offered was inconvenient, and there was no worthy alternatives with full integration to the platform.

In this article, I want to share how the idea came about, the mistakes I made, how I found my first customers, and how I gradually grew to a steady income of $250,000 a year over five years. All of this — without investors, a 20-person team, or a “Series A” round.

We at Verilog Meetup constructed an exam/interview problem that has an interesting property: if a student tries to figure out a solution by thinking by himself, he usually succeeds; however if he dumps the problem on ChatGPT, the solution fails (does not pass the automated test), and the student goes into a death spiral of futility, kicking ChatGPT to get the solution right.

There is nothing weird about the problem, we do this in the industry all the time:

In this tutorial, I’ll explain in simple terms what AI, AI agents, and workflows are, and then I’ll walk you through building your very first AI agent in Python using Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK). By the end, you’ll understand the differences between these concepts and have a working content-assistant agent you can run from your terminal or a web interface.

It’s Never Too Late: My Start into DevOps

Summary

Learn about the challenges, growth, and lessons gained — from juggling work, studies, and a pet project to achieving a dream.

According to Gartner, natural language queries will replace SQL as early as 2026. 

While Gartner's prediction may be optimistic, the shift toward natural language interfaces for databases is inevitable. The timeline may vary, but the transition itself is a certainty.

For people familiar with the term DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), it often carries an unpleasant association: blocking, regulators, censorship, tightening controls. In reality, DPI is simply the name of a technology whose essence lies in the deep analysis of network traffic. Deep traffic analysis involves identifying protocols, extracting the most significant fields and metadata, classifying internet services, and analyzing the nature of network flows. I will explain how such solutions work in this article.

We all strive to build better software, and to do it faster. I believe Test-driven Development offers us a path towards this goal. Still struggling to efficiently utilize this approach? Then I invite you to discuss my tips and tricks to unlock the benefits of TDD!