Zed (an open-source editor) has generated quite a bit of hype in programming circles, especially since it is written in Rust, and also refreshingly it’s not just another VS Code fork. That being said, it’s still a niche editor. I mainly use VS Code - decided to try out Zed to see if it lives up to the hype 😀. As such, I will be comparing Zed with VS Code as that’s the editor I’m most familiar with. When I encounter a feature, limitation or useful setting in Zed, I update it here: Zed Editor NOTES. This post explores a subset of my experiences with Zed - for the full version, do check out this GitHub Gist and star it if you find it useful :)

TLDR: I like Zed (especially its instant loading speed) - it’s especially impressive how much Zed supports out of the box, considering how young the project is. But for Data Science (Python) work, it’s not yet fully ready to replace VS Code, mainly due to issues with Jupyter Notebook (though it is rapidly getting better).

Environment I used: Zed 1.7.2 on Ubuntu 26.04.

Most commonly on the web, HTTP involves the client repeatedly sending requests, and for each, the server sends back responses. This works for most applications but is not performant enough for real-time applications. The most performance-sensitive applications (like multi-player real-time games) use WebSocket sessions instead of normal stateless HTTP connections. This boosts performance but at the cost of complexity — now the server needs to manage both HTTP and WebSocket sessions. Plus, the WebSocket sessions are stateful and inherently more complex than HTTP sessions.

There’s a third option — Server-Sent Events (SSE), which is a middle ground between these two. SSE still uses HTTP machinery (so there’s less complexity), but like WebSockets, they are stateful. They are less performant than WebSockets but still fast enough for real-time applications like chat notifications. Unlike WebSockets, SSE is one-way (server → client), but this is sufficient for many applications.

So there’s a complexity vs. performance tradeoff, from the simplest to the most complex and performant:

• Normal HTTP → HTTP Server-Sent Events → WebSockets.

Hey everyone! Recently, my pull request (PR) to add offline Progressive Web App (PWA) capability to ngn/apl was accepted. I wanted to share how I went about making this open source contribution. But before we go further, feel free to check out the ngn/apl website - you can install it as an offline PWA app like this.

A while ago, I came across the book Blood, Sweat and Pixels, which is a fascinating glimpse inside the world of video game development. I am not a video game player, but I am a Software Engineer, so I could relate to many of the development aspects & difficulties. Especially the grind and unrealistic deadlines were relatable for me, as I have also sometimes had to work with tight deadlines, though thankfully much less than was portrayed in this book about the development of video games.