New overloads on TarFile.CreateFromDirectory accept a TarEntryFormat parameter, giving direct control over the archive format. Previously, CreateFromDirectory produced Pax archives. The new overloads support all four tar formats—Pax, Ustar, GNU, and V7—for compatibility with specific tools and environments.
Every iOS app I've shipped over the last nine years started the same way: a Rails developer with a great web app, users who want it in the App Store, and weeks spent on Xcode, signing certificates, and Swift boilerplate that has nothing to do with the actual product.
Modern web applications are no longer just "sites." They are long-lived, highly interactive systems that span multiple runtimes, global content delivery networks, edge caches, background workers, and increasingly complex data pipelines. They are expected to load instantly, remain responsive under poor network conditions, and degrade gracefully when something goes wrong.
A JavaScript script saved as a bookmark is called a 'bookmarklet,' although some people also use the term 'favelet' or 'favlet.' Bookmarklets have been around since the late 90s. The site that coined them, bookmarklets.com, even remains around today. They're simple and versatile, a fact evidenced by most of the bookmarklets listed on the aforementioned site are still working today despite being untouched for over two decades.
A global survey of 2,039 Java developers published today finds 63% reporting that dead and unused code adversely affects their team's productivity, with 22% describing the impact of that technical debt as being severe. Conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Azul, a provider of a distribution of OpenJDK, the survey also finds that more than half (56%) now deal with a Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) involving Java on a daily or weekly basis.
I began by creating a soft link locally from my blog's repo of posts to the src/pages/posts of a new Astro site. My blog currently has 6742 posts (all high quality I assure you). Each one looks like so: --- layout: post title: "Creating Reddit Summaries with URL Context and Gemini" date: "2026-02-09T18:00:00" categories: ["development"] tags: ["python","generative ai"] banner_image: /images/banners/cat_on_papers2.jpg permalink: /2026/02/09/creating-reddit-summaries-with-gemini description: Using Gemini APIs to create a summary of a subreddit. --- Interesting content no one will probably read here...
Using AI to help download photos so we can consolidate all our images into one place. Over the years, [Audrey](https://audrey.feldroy.com) and I have accumulated photos across a variety of services. Flickr, SmugMug, and others all have chunks of our memories sitting on their servers. Some of these services we haven't touched in years, others we pay for but rarely use. It was time to bring everything home.
Dear JS ecosystem, I love you, but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the Web, and the time has come for an intervention. No, this is not another rant about npm's security issues. Abstraction is the cornerstone of modern software engineering. Reusing logic and building higher-level solutions from lower-level building blocks is what makes all the technological wonders around us possible. Imagine if every time anyone wrote a calculator they also had to reinvent floating-point arithmetic and string encoding!
OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Health, a dedicated section inside ChatGPT focused entirely on personal health. It's more than a themed chat - users can discuss symptoms, interpret lab results, track metrics over time, and get clear explanations of medical terms. A key feature is integration with health and fitness services. Users can connect Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and similar apps so the AI can analyze sleep, activity, nutrition, and wellness trends.
Today's browsers can handle most of the problems that frontend frameworks were originally created to solve. Web Components provide encapsulation, ES modules manage dependencies, modern CSS features like Grid and container queries enable complex layouts, and the Fetch API covers network requests. Despite this, developers still default to React, Angular, Vue, or another JavaScript framework to address problems the browser already handles natively. That default often trades real user costs -page weight, performance, and SEO - for developer convenience.
Software development used to be simpler, with fewer choices about which platforms and languages to learn. You were either a Java, .NET, or LAMP developer. You focused on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Full-stack developers learned the intricacies of selected JavaScript frameworks, relational databases, and CI/CD tools. In the best of times, developers advanced their technology skills with their employer's funding and time to experiment. They attended conferences, took courses, and learned the low-code development platforms their employers invested in.
The web is full of AI assistants that appear to understand application UIs, user data, and intent. In practice, however, most of these systems operate outside the application itself. When you try to build one from scratch, you quickly run into a core limitation: large language models have no native understanding of your React state, component hierarchy, or business logic.