The author credits an 800-page PHP and MySQL book with launching their web development career over twenty years ago. They are now seeking similar comprehensive book recommendations for topics like Linux sysadmin, bash, or audio DSP in Rust.
The Servo browser engine is now available as an embeddable library on crates.io. A CLI tool called servo-shot was created to take screenshots of webpages using the new crate. While compiling Servo to WebAssembly isn't feasible, a playground was built for experimenting with html5ever and markup5ever_rcdom crates in WebAssembly.
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using detailed prompts. The model is available via the Gemini API and can only output audio files. The prompting system allows for detailed voice direction including accent, style, and emotional tone.
Datasette has replaced its token-based CSRF protection with a new approach using Sec-Fetch-Site headers, inspired by Go 1.25 and research by Filippo Valsorda. This eliminates the need for CSRF tokens in templates and removes related plugin hooks.
SQLite 3.53.0 is a major release with accumulated improvements including ALTER TABLE support for NOT NULL and CHECK constraints, new json_array_insert() function, and CLI enhancements via a new Query Results Formatter library.
Google has released a new Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS text-to-speech model. The article provides a link to notes about this new AI tool.