TECH PULSE WEEKLY // ISSUE#3 // May 6

May 2026

STATUS REPORT

Another week of shipping. I finally migrated one of my side projects from Node to Bun - cold starts and build times now feel illegal. Still hitting ocassional ecosystem edges, but the DX is addictive.

The blog reset is working: raw, short posts are getting better engagement than the old long-form stuff, less perfection, more signal.

Question for you Whats one tool or workflow change you made in the last 30 days that moved the needle? REply and let me know.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A big thank you to all the new newsletter subscribers who joined this week, WElcome to the Underground Dev, Glad you are here.

TOOLS + INTEL

This issue is all about the tools i've been actively testing recently and genuinely loved.

• EvilCharts - Beautiful, opinionated chart components built on the Recharts + shadcn. Handcrafted with smooth animations and unique designs. If you are tired of ugly default charts, his is a breath of fresh air.
• Shunpo - A minimalist bash tool that makes terminal directory navigation stupidly fast. Bookmarks (sb / sg), quick jumps, dive down, and smart selection. Perfect for heavy terminal users who hate slow cd workflow. Lightweight and delightful.
• OverType - The markdown editro thats just a textarea. Transparent overlay on rendered preview. 91KB, one script tag, native browser behaviour(undo, redo, mobile selection etc). Anti-complexity at its finest-no ContentEditable nightmares.

These three tools have earned permanent spots in my workflow this week. Highly recommended.

What are you experimenting with? Hit reply :).

THE CHALLENGE

Longest Alternative Substring Given a string s consisting of lowercase English letters, find the length of the longest substring where no two adjacent characters are the same.

Examples:

• s = "abcda" -> 5 (the whole string alternates)
• s = "abbcc" -> 2 ("ab", "bc", etc)
• s = abcddefg" -> 5 ("cdefg" of "abcdd" fails at the double "d")

Constraints

• 1 <= s.length <= 10^5
• s consists of only lowercase english letters

Rules

• Solve it in your preferred langauge.
• Write clean readable code with comments
• Add a few test cases
• Share your solution(Github Gist or repo), the cleanest or most clever ones will get featured next issue.

FINAL WORD

Stop collecting tools. Start deleting the ones that dont earn their keep. The bar for good tooling in 2026 is high,speed, simplicity and zero-fluff win.

See you next week

- Ongoro The Underground Dev