Codeaholics 2026.1 with ExpressVPN

Welcome back to Codeaholics!
We will kickstart our 2026 collaborating with ExpressVPN!

Talk#1: The Pain of Processing PDFs by Angus Cheng
Reading PDFs is very difficult, here's what I've learnt over the last five years running a SaaS that processes PDFs

Talk#2: Why does ExpressVPN switch from C to Rust for Lightway’s code? by Thomas Leong
We built Lightway from scratch in a quest to offer a VPN protocol that serves the needs of VPN users in a modern, mobile world—one that’s fast, secure, and reliable. Since launching Lightway five years ago, we’ve had it open-sourced and audited, as well as implementing key upgrades. We have just rolled out a new version of Lightway to users—one that sees our pioneering VPN protocol rewritten in Rust programming language. For this technical talk, we wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the more technical reasons behind the changes we’ve made and dive into the benefits of Rust over C, the language we originally used for Lightway code.