1
Cold-blooded software
It’s 2004 and I’m sitting in one of the largest lecture halls at my university. I’m a computer science major but I’m taking a course on natural history — plants and animals — as one of my electives.
Patrick Dubroy
Programmer and researcher, designer of alternate futures. I write here about programming, usability, and interaction design.
- Popular posts
- 5
- Total points
- 1,168
- HN comments
- 548
- Rank
- #1,769 personal
Visit dubroy.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2009 – May 2026
Software Engineering 4Tools & Productivity 1Systems & Performance 1Career & Management 1
2
Getting things done in small increments (2022)
Many programmers subscribe to the belief that they need large blocks of uninterrupted time to get anything done. Paul Graham wrote about this in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule :
3
Garbage collection is useful
A long time ago, I spent a few years working on garbage collection in the J9 Java VM. 1 And even though I’ve since done mostly done higher-level stuff, having a deeper knowledge of GC has continued to come in useful.
4
Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
In response to a question on Twitter 1 , Richard Hipp wrote about why SQLite uses a bytecode VM for executing SQL statements.
5
Are short methods actually worse?
I ran across an interesting post on programming.reddit called Anecdote Driven Development, or Why I Don’t Do TDD . The article focused on testing, but what I found most interesting was the part about how long a method or function should be: