[Dev Catch Up #58] - Meta's Llama 4 herd, Playwright MCP server, Plain, Revive, GitDiagram, Go 1.24.2, Hyperlight, Xan, Lilly, and More
Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the trends including, a bunch of exciting developments and articles
Welcome to the 58th edition of DevShorts, Dev Catch Up!
For those who joined recently or are reading Dev Catch Up for the first time, I write about developer stories and open source, partly based on my work and experience interacting with people all over the globe.
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Must Read
It’s Meta’s week, with the launch of new models under the Llama 4 family. Scout comes with a 10 million token context window. Maverick competes with GPT-4o in reasoning, and Behemoth is an upcoming giant expected to lead in STEM benchmark. Read Meta’s blog for more details.
Playwright MCP server is worth a look if browser automation is part of your workflow. Built by Microsoft, it offers tools for navigation, form-filling, and data extraction and it is available as a npm package. Check their GitHub repository for implementation details.
Maintaining open-source projects can be time-consuming. GitHub’s latest blog highlights five useful Actions to automate common tasks, with real examples from popular projects. Check more details on the GitHub blog.
For backend developers, especially Python devs, check out Plain, a Python framework. It offers clean URL routing, Jinja templates, form handling, and middleware support like other frameworks. Learn more about Plain framework here.
OSS Highlight of the Week
This week we are covering Hyperlight in our OSS highlight, as we’ve been hearing growing reports of attackers hiding malware in GitHub repos. Hyperlight is a lightweight Virtual Machine Manager built in Rust that runs untrusted code in secure micro virtual machines without needing a full OS. It supports Windows and Linux. Check out the GitHub repo for more details.
Good to know
If you're a fan of NotebookLM like me, these new features might interest you. "Discover sources" will bring curated collection of relevant sources from the web, and "I’m Feeling Curious" lets you explore a random topic. Check Google’s blog for more.
For Go developers, note this upcoming change in Go 1.25. The concept of core types is being removed to simplify generics and reduce confusion, without affecting existing code. Read the Go blog for more details.
Developers working with Supabase can now benefit from their new UI library built on shadcn/ui. It includes pre-built components for Auth, Storage, and Realtime features, making integration much simpler. Read the full announcement to learn more.
If you use SSH in your workflow, pico.sh offers practical tools for publishing sites, blogs, and code snippets using
rsync,scp, orsftp. No extra setup needed. Check their GitHub repo for details.Python developers, here's a clever trick with
uvthat lets you create self-contained scripts by defining dependencies directly in comments. This approach eliminates virtual environment hassles and makes scripts more portable. Read the complete technique on dusktreader's blog.Go 1.24.2 is out with key security fixes for
net/httpand important bug fixes across the compiler, runtime, and more. Check out the Go release notes for more details.
Notable FYIs
Terminal-based editors are evolving fast. Lilly is a pre-alpha, VIM-inspired editor with built-in features and no plugins needed. Think Helix with VIM motions. Built in V, it’s minimal, fast, and already self-hosting.
Navigating large GitHub codebases can be a pain. GitDiagram turns any repo into an interactive system diagram. Just swap "hub" with "diagram" in the URL and see the structure visually. Check out this interesting project here.
CSV is still everywhere, and if you work with it often, xan might be worth a look. It’s a fast Rust-based CLI tool for filtering, joining, and visualizing large CSVs. Read more details in the Github repo.
Linting in Go does not have to slow you down. Revive is a drop-in golint replacement that runs up to 6x faster, supports TOML config, and lets you disable rules selectively. With custom rules, multiple formatters, and optional type checking, it's worth exploring at revive.run.
With Node v18 nearing its end-of-life in April 2025. It is recommended to update to Node.js 20 or 22 as Node.js 18 will no longer receive security updates. Read the full advisory to understand the implications.
If you're building Node.js applications, note that Express 5.1 is now the default release on npm. After a long wait and security audits, Express 5.x is officially stable. Read the full release notes for new features, performance updates, and how to migrate from v4 to v5.
That’s it from us with this edition. We hope you are going away with a ton of new information. Lastly, share this newsletter with your colleagues and pals if you find it valuable. A subscription to the newsletter will be awesome if you are reading it for the first time.