Hey there 👋,

This week, during a moment of weakness, I caved and installed Cursor. I experimented a bit, and a couple hours later I found myself deciding to sign up for the pro version at the end of the month. Now, I won’t give any opinions on AI and “vibe coding” because I feel there are enough people on LinkedIn doing that. I just wanted to share something with you :).

I have some ideas for LaunchWeek and some things might start to change in the following weeks as the newsletter continues to grow and mature. For this week, I give you some nice news and releases.

As always, please share this newsletter with friends and anyone who you think will benefit from it. I am trying to build SA’s #1 software developer community and I will most definitely need your help!

Enjoy the letter 🚀.

AI & TECH

Bear Blog defends against AI-powered DDoS attacks

While most of us are already familiar with how companies use content from creators to train their AI models, Herman has found another problem. One that affects more people than they realise. A problem he has termed The Great Scape.

Recently, Herman had to put in some work to protect his website - Bear Blog - from the current LLM crawlers which are DDoS attacking websites. Other websites such as SourceHut and LWN have been battling the same problem.

One of the reasons why this is such a difficult problem to solve is because while you want to block these LLM crawlers, which are interested in identifying as such, you still want to allow the good bots, such as search engine crawlers.

This isn’t a problem that only Herman has found. Many other tools and companies have jumped into this war with AI crawlers. CloudFlare has built AI Labyrinth, a tool that traps these bots in a endless maze.

Herman has saved Bear Blog, and I would recommend anyone with a website or product to read his article on it.

BANKING

In-App Calling

The teams at Capitec have deployed a new feature called In-App Calling, which enables you to call a support agent directly from the Capitec app from anywhere in the world without having to use airtime.

Powered by Amazon Connect, this feature enhances the quality of the call and let’s agents pull your information directly from the system.

I personally know a few of the people who worked on this, and I want to congratulate them on this amazing achievement 🙌 .

DEVELOPER SPOTLIGHT

Masilela Thembelihle

Representing Pretoria, we have Masilela Thembelihle! During high-school, she had a lesson on Probability, and it completely changed how she viewed her wardrobe. That lesson helped her maximise her wardrobe and it’s a mindset she still uses today.

But what makes this amazing is how she took this concept and built a web app with it so that others can also do the same. Using JavaScript, she learned about arrays, loops and structuring data.

While functional, there are some minor improvements she wants to make before releasing including:

• Cleaner UI with easy-to-use layout.

• Image previews of different outfit combinations.

• Filters to categorise and suggest styles.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

🙌 Entelect is hiring

Entelect Software has taken Sunday Times’s Best Place to Work 2024 and the great thing is that they are hiring! Especially Java engineers but they also have roles open for mobile developers, JavaScript developers and .NET developers. Reach out to us for more information on how you can potentially join this great company.

VNEXT

👀 What to look out for

Here are some articles I found to be very interesting along with some nice tools you might want to use for your next project.

• Cloudflare Tunnels - a cool way for you to essentially securely host something from your home computer without having a public IP.

• Wheel of Names - We have been using this to help us decide who runs the next standup.

• Laravel - A PHP framework which I will most likely start using since I can deploy it to a shared Linux server for R99 per month 🤔 .

MEME