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Tech Choices I Regret at Spectrum
Spectrum is an open source chat app for large online communities. With the benefit of hindsight, here are the technology choices I regret.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
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“I Could Rewrite Curl”
Collected quotes and snippets from people publicly sneezing off or belittling what curl is, explaining how easy it would be to make a replacement in no time with no effort or generally not being very helpful. These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add ……
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Thoughts on Python 3
My current thoughts on the state of Python 3 and where it’s heading.
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Why is my Rust build so slow?
I’ve recently come back to an older project of mine (that powers this website), and as I did some maintenance work: upgrade to newer crates, upgrade to a newer rustc, I noticed that my build was ta...
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How fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode (2019)
I would like to thank krazhier and Keits for taking hours out of their busy schedules to discuss technical aspects of netcode with me, and Sajam for taking time to answer interview questions and being supportive throughout the writing process. I would also like to especially thank MagicMoste for making all the…
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Software Inventory by Joel Spolsky
Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with a few people buzzing around. As your eyes adjus…
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How to improve Python packaging
There is an area of Python that many developers have problems with. This is an area that has seen many different solutions pop up over the years, with many different opinions, wars, and attempts to solve it. Many have complained about the packaging ecosystem and tools making their lives harder. Many beginners are…
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Write any javascript code with just these characters: ()[]{}+
Hi! I've taken this blog offline, but you can still read this post in the archive.org version .
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I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
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What do you mean by “Event-Driven”?
Some notes on the different patterns that may be present when people talk about event-driven architectures.
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The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
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Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell
What if you had to fight against your company's culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration. Initially met with skepticism, Snover's idea faced resistance from a company that favored…
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Understanding Git
Git is quickly becoming one of the most popular version control systems in use. There are plenty of tutorials on Git already. How is this one different?
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7-Zip: Multiple Memory Corruptions via RAR and ZIP
Blog about anti-virus software vulnerabilities.
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Better Compression with Zstandard
I think I first heard about the Zstandard compression algorithm at a Mercurial developer sprint in 2015. At one end of a large table a few people were uttering expletives out of sheer excitement. At developer gatherings, that's the universal signal for something is awesome . Long story short, a Facebook engineer…
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Zig and Rust
This post will be a bit all over the place. Several months ago, I wrote Hard Mode Rust, exploring an allocation-conscious style of programming. In the ensuing discussion, @jamii name-dropped TigerBeetle, a reliable, distributed, fast, and small database written in Zig in a similar style, and, well, I now find myself…
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File Descriptor Limits
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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Unifying the Technical Interview
Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips…
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Fast enough VMs in fast enough time
Updated (February 07 2013): If you enjoy this article, you may also find the more academically-inclined article The Impact of Meta-Tracing on VM Design and Implementation interesting.
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Easy Scalable Text Rendering on the GPU
This post describes the text rendering algorithm I used on thetamath.com, a GPU-powered 2D equation renderer I wrote for fun last December…
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Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
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Use Haskell for shell scripting
turtle 1.0 announcement post
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Why aren't you using git-flow?
git-flow is a library of git subcommands that helps automate your branching and release workflow workflow, using Vincent Driessen's successful branching model.
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Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice
This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the beginning of their career – assuming they can act upon it (and I really don't know whether my 20-year-old self could…