XPath Can Replace Loops in Power Automate, Cutting Actions and Boosting Speed

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Developers building Power Automate flows often default to the 'Apply to each' loop for handling arrays, but this approach can slow execution and inflate action counts as workflows scale. XPath offers a direct alternative for querying XML data, allowing users to extract specific values without iterating through every record. For example, instead of looping through hundreds of employee entries, a single XPath expression can retrieve the exact record matching a given ID. This technique is particularly useful when working with XML files, SOAP APIs, legacy system responses, and SharePoint payloads. Applying such targeted optimizations across multiple production flows can meaningfully reduce complexity and improve overall automation performance.

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Magnitude 7.1 Earthquake Strikes Japan

A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Japan, according to data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). The event was recorded on July 28, 2026, based on the event ID in the JMA source URL. The JMA published details of the seismic event on its official multilingual earthquake information portal. Further details including the exact location, depth, and any reported damage were not available from the provided source.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Context Engineering, Not Prompt Engineering, Is the Key to Reliable AI Coding Agents

A growing body of developer experience suggests that the real bottleneck when working with AI coding agents is not how prompts are worded, but what information is loaded into the agent's context window and when. Practitioners recommend maintaining a project-level instructions file — such as CLAUDE.md or .cursorrules — that captures build commands, architectural decisions, and hard boundaries rather than restating things the agent can infer from code. Because agents lose all session context once a conversation ends, developers are also advised to keep a separate directory of topic-scoped memory notes recording non-obvious decisions, rejected approaches, and lessons learned that no static analysis tool would surface. Subagents are highlighted not just for parallelism but for context isolation, allowing exploratory tasks to run separately so their intermediate token load does not crowd the main working session. Together, these practices form a deliberate, teachable discipline the article calls context engineering, aimed at reducing hallucinations and improving output consistency across coding agent sessions.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Zero Trust for OCI Databases: Why Basic Access Hygiene Comes Before Architecture

A technical article by Abhilash Kumar Bhattaram, part of a 52-week series, examines how database access control in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) involves multiple overlapping layers including IAM policies, network security groups, compartments, and the database's own privilege model. The piece identifies nine common access misconfigurations — such as overly broad IAM policies, shared admin credentials, and open DB listener ports — that typically stem from convenience decisions never revisited. Bhattaram argues that least privilege must be enforced in practice across each layer of the access chain, not treated as a policy statement alone. He recommends concrete fixes including scoping IAM policies to named groups and compartments, using Dynamic Groups for automation, and conducting periodic access recertification. The article positions foundational access hygiene as a prerequisite to implementing a full Zero Trust architecture for cloud databases.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Developer Tests Visual Builder vs AI Prompting to Build the Same Landing Page

A developer at Neleto built the same four-section landing page twice — once manually using the platform's block-based visual editor and once by prompting Claude via an MCP server. The manual build took roughly 11 minutes, with multi-column content proving the most time-consuming step at four minutes alone. The AI-assisted build completed in about 90 seconds, handling repetitive parallel content most efficiently but still requiring minor manual tweaks for polish. The experiment led to a practical workflow: use prompts for structural and repetitive layouts, and the visual editor for fine-tuned design decisions. The author concludes that combining both methods — AI for scaffolding, mouse for finishing — is the fastest way to publish a page on Neleto.

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