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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.
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Visit dubroy.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2009 – May 2026
Software Engineering 4Tools & Productivity 1Systems & Performance 1Career & Management 1
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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.
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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.
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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: