Nephila Radar [4/26 | Oct 12 – Oct 25]

Adam, a backend and distributed systems developer who writes on Dev.to as "The Developer", argues that Clean Code, applied as dogma, has taken the place of judgment. He starts from a case he witnessed: a senior developer spent three days rewriting code that worked fine, only because the functions seemed too long. The result was a new version with two bugs that weren't there before. He then draws on Sandi Metz's point that duplication costs far less than the wrong abstraction, and suggests judging code by how easily the team can change it.

Worth reading to understand when it pays to keep two similar functions instead of abstracting them, and what to ask yourself before a refactor: The Cult of Clean Code - Adam (The Developer)

Mahad Kalam, a 17-year-old from the UK and a member of Hack Club, examines the AI Skills Hub, the site the UK government is using to train 10 million workers in AI skills by 2030. PwC built it for £4.1 million, but the site links out to courses hosted on external platforms, such as Salesforce's Trailhead, and the intellectual property course cites US fair use instead of UK fair dealing. In the view of the author, who considers the site AI-generated, a small software house could have done better for less than 5% of that sum.

Worth reading to look at public procurement from the user's side, from content to accessibility, as well as the amount spent: The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site - Mahad Kalam

Emiliano Mandrone, Senior Researcher at Inapp, Italy's National Institute for Public Policy Analysis, picks up an argument published in The New York Times: critical thinking, meaning researching, reflecting and comparing views before making a decision, is becoming a luxury good. Notifications, infinite scroll and engagement-driven rankings push towards knowledge made of fragments, and widen the gap between people who read in depth and people who just scroll. Among the remedies, he proposes media literacy in schools and platforms with transparent algorithms.

Worth reading to understand why the time and attention it takes to research before deciding need to be protected on purpose: Pensare è diventato un lusso: il declino cognitivo nell'era digitale - Emiliano Mandrone

At PyCon Italia 2026, Iacopo Spalletti, CTO and Solution Architect at Nephila, gave a talk on how we used FastHTML to build an internal tool that manages project tokens and credentials. The data model was simple, and FastHTML was the right choice. As the requirements grew, with more use cases, a much more complex model and a permission system to handle, it was no longer the best fit for the project's needs. We've gathered these thoughts in a dedicated article on the blog.

Worth reading to understand which signals tell you a project needs more structure, before you find out halfway through: FastHTML in practice: finding the right fit - Iacopo Spalletti

Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping platform developed by Kaleidos under the MPL-2.0 license. You can sign up for a free account at design.penpot.app and work in the browser, or install it on your own server with Docker or Kubernetes. It uses open standards (SVG, CSS, HTML, JSON), builds layouts with Flex and Grid the way CSS does, and handles components and design tokens, so developers can inspect the code that matches the design directly.

Worth trying if you want design and development to work on the same standards, on your own server too: Penpot

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We wrote this article with the support of AI. If you're interested in how we use these tools as part of our writing process, you can read more here.