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Why numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 267 posts.
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A note of reflection after 10 years of “A successful Git branching model”
In this post I present a Git branching strategy for developing and releasing version-based software.
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SQLite as an Application File Format (2014)
An SQLite database file with a defined schema often makes an excellent application file format. Here are a dozen reasons why this is so:
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How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
In this post, I describe the phenomenon of the so-called expert beginner -- someone with mediocre skill who thinks he's an expert.
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Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Magyar / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Srpski /…
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Blogging about Midori (2015)
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
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Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang
If you have heard of Zig before, you may know it as a promising new programming language which is ambitiously trying to overthrow C as the de-facto systems language. But did you know that it also can straight up compile C code?
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The Tao of Programming (1987)
Note: I copied this from http://misspiggy.gsfc.nasa.gov/tao.html and stripped out all of the IMHO extraneous formatting. ---Alex
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CQRS: Command Query Responsibility Segregation (2011)
CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) is the notion that you can use a different model to update information than the model you use to read information
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Erase your darlings: immutable infrastructure for mutable systems
Over time, a system collects state on its root partition. This state lives in assorted directories like /etc and /var , and represents every under-documented or out-of-order step in bringing up the services.
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95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
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What Is Zig's “Colorblind” Async/Await?
An introduction to Zig's curious concurrent programming API.
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Why I’m Leaving Elm
Why I can't use Elm, and can't recommend it to others.
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Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)
Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…
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Reversing the technical interview (2017)
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
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Introduction to ARC/ORC in Nim
Nim is advancing towards more efficient memory management models. Let's talk about ARC/ORC and see how they will change the way memory works in Nim.
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Undefined behavior can result in time travel (2014)
The rules of logic no longer apply when you cross the line.
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Securing Firefox with WebAssembly
Protecting the security and privacy of individuals is a central tenet of Mozilla’s mission. While we continue to make extensive use of both sandboxing and Rust in Firefox to address ...
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Rewriting the heart of our sync engine
Over the past four years, we've been working hard on rebuilding our desktop client's sync engine from scratch. The sync engine is the magic behind the Dropbox folder on your desktop computer, and it's one of the oldest and most important pieces of code at Dropbox. We're proud to announce today that we've shipped this…
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Staff archetypes
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…
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The Day AppGet Died
The story of how Microsoft embraced and then killed AppGet.
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The Hardest Program I've Ever Written – How a code formatter works (2015)
The hardest program I’ve ever written, once you strip out the whitespace, is 3,835 lines long. That handful of code took me almost a year to write. Granted, that doesn’t take into account the code that didn’t make it. The commit history shows that I deleted 20,704 lines of code over that time. Every surviving line has…
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Software Disenchantment (2018)
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
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Xi-Editor Retrospective
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
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Zero-Bundle-Size React Server Components
This blog site has been archived. Go to react.dev/blog to see the recent posts. 2020 has been a long year. As it comes to an end we wanted to share a special Holiday Update on our research into zero-bundle-size React Server Components. To introduce React Server Components, we have prepared a talk and a demo. If you…