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Software engineering books to read and reread
Advanced Web Application Architecture allows you to spot what kind of code you're dealing with:
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,546 posts.
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Running Python code in a sandbox with MicroPython and WASM
I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics …
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Common Lisp as a Scripting Language, 2015 Edition
The first computer I used had about 2KB of RAM. The other day, I compiled a 2KB Common Lisp script into a 16MB executable to get its startup (and total execution) time down from 2s to subjectively instantaneous — and that didn't bother me the least, for my current computer has 8GB of working memory…
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Cargo's next few years
The Cargo team have been thinking about and discussing long-term plans for Cargo. In this post I'll talk about what we hope Cargo will look like around the time of the next edition (assuming there is another edition and that it happens in about three years, neither of which is
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Vim: So long Pathogen, hello native package loading
Vim 8 added a native way to load third-party packages. This means, for me at least, there is no longer any need to use a third party plugin helper like Pathogen.
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A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game
Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware or emulation…
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Godot as an Embeddable Game Engine
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
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How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human
Lately, I’ve been reading articles about best practices for code reviews. I notice that these articles focus on finding bugs to the exclusion of almost every…
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Apple's CVDisplayLink Doesn't Link to Your Display
Edit 2017/12/10: So I screwed up, I thought I was safe confirming it in two different ways but I was using an external monitor and all of the below is accurate only for a specific multi-monitor case. Skip to the bottom to read about my new results.
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QBE – Compiler Backend – 1.3
QBE 1.3 took a while to cook, but it is the most significant release since 1.0 with around 7k new lines of code and 1.5k deleted ones. In addition to the usual bug fixes, QBE gained a new and original IL matching algorithm, new optimizations from Roland Paterson-Jones, Scott Graham added support for the Windows ABI…
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Ways to generate SSA
Static Single Assignment is a program representation where each “variable” (though this term can be misleading) is assigned exactly once. Mostly the variables aren’t variables at all, but instead names for values—for expressions. SSA is used a lot in compilers. See this lesson from Cornell for converting Bril to SSA…
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Top-Down LR Parsing
This semester, I am teaching Compilers , and I'm quite happy with how I covered parsing this year. Specifically, I taught students to build a top-down LR parser and it seemed to go relatively well.
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Incorporating and accessing binary data into a C program
Blog about Ubuntu from a kernel engineer
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What is static program analysis?
The halting problem asks whether the execution of a specific program for a given input will terminate.
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Hermitage: Testing the “I” in ACID
tl;dr: I have created a test suite for comparing the transaction isolation levels in different databases. I did this as background research for my book . This post explains why.
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Bundling binary tools in Python wheels
I spotted a new (to me) pattern which I think is pretty interesting: projects are bundling compiled binary applications as part of their Python packaging wheels. I think it’s really …
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A Healthy Diet For The Mind
I've been enjoying teaching Intelligent Systems again this semester. A big part of the fun is re-reading old papers. I had a lot of fun re-reading and thinking about the ideas in William Clancey 's classic paper, Heuristic Classification . Long-time readers may recall me mentioning this paper in a long-ago post about…
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Writing an Efficient Vulkan Renderer
In 2018, I wrote an article “Writing an efficient Vulkan renderer” for GPU Zen 2 book, which was published in 2019. In this article I tried to aggregate as much information about Vulkan performance as I could - instead of trying to focus on one particular aspect or application, this is trying to cover a wide range of…
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How fast is Go? Simulating particles on a smart TV
The challenge, simulate millions of particles in golang, multi-player enabled, cpu only, smart tv compatible.
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Fixing left and mutual recursions in grammars
Left & Mutual Recursion Mitigation
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Solving a “Layton Puzzle” with Prolog
I have a lot in the works for the this month's Logic for Programmers release. Among other things, I'm completely rewriting the chapter on Logic Programming...
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Know how your org works, or how to become a more effective engineer
A few months ago, exhausted by a constant stream of people perennially disappointed about reward structures at companies, I made what…
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A simple way to get more value from tracing
A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of private conversations I've had. Sure, there's value somewhere, but it costs…
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I got the GNU Modula-2 compiler working on OpenBSD
When it rains it pours. After making a splash with D , 1 I remembered that some time ago I began an attempt to bring the GNU Modula-2 compiler to OpenBSD . Because why not? Modula-2 is a language that exists and has compiler implementations. I guess my goal is to bring all the languages and compilers to OpenBSD. And…
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Anatomy of a Program in Memory (2009)
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi