2011
Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts
thoughts, talks, docs and unpopular opinions
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.
2012
The compiler will optimize that away
A lot of programmers believe that compilers are magic black boxes in which you put your messy code in and get a nice optimized binary out. The hallway philosophers will often start a debate on which language features or compiler flags to use in order to capture the full power of the compiler’s magic. If you have ever…
2013
2014
2015
How Does React Tell a Class from a Function?
We talk about classes, new, instanceof, prototype chains, and API design.
2016
2017
Rust Starter Kit 2020
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
2018
* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW
One of my least favorite parts about layout with CSS is the relationship of width and padding. You’re busy defining widths to match your grid or general column proportions, then down the line you start to add in text, which necessitates defining padding for those boxes. And ‘lo and behold, you now are subtracting…
2019
Retraction: The App Store Rejection of the Week That Was a Correct Rejection
My disdain for astrology is so utter, and my esteem for Godier’s previous work so high, that it simply never occurred to me that he might have actually made and submitted to the App Store an astrology app, let alone that he’d then feign surprise and frustration that an astrology app was rejected for being an astrology…
2020
Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques
Towards the end of Wim Wenders’s excellent Perfect Days , the protagonist Hirayama is drinking beer under a bridge after he has seen a Businessman courting his crush. Suddenly the Businessman joins him under the bridge. As it turns out, things aren’t actually that simple but the point is their conversation takes them…
2021
The Illustrated Word2vec
Discussions: Hacker News (347 points, 37 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (151 points, 19 comments) Translations: Chinese (Simplified), French, Korean, Portuguese, Russian “There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that…
2022
“Modern” C++ Lamentations
“ Standard Ranges ” blog post by Eric Niebler – about C++20 ranges feature – was doing rounds in the game development twitterverse lately, with many expressing something like a “dislike” (mildly said) about the state of modern C++.
2023
Never use a dependency that you could replace with an afternoon of programming
Never use a dependency that you could replace with an afternoon of programming.
2024
Is WebAssembly magic performance pixie dust?
Add WebAssembly, get performance. Is that how it really works?
2025
Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles
My opinions have changed somewhat since I last wrote this blog post, and I wish to clarify some things. Please read the follow-up in my latest post Clarifying Some Things .
2026
Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
Everything your mentor wants to say but HR won't let them
2027
If PHP Were British
PHP, as the result of a spectacular error of judgement, appears to be written in US English. How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?
2028
Magit 3.0
Blog of Jonas Bernoulli
2029
Tracking SQLite Database Changes in Git
Note : This post stirred up some interesting discussions on HackerNews and Lobste.rs .
2030
The Several Million Dollar Bug
In case you landed here without any context and have no idea who I am or what this article is about this article should give you some background.
2031
Quake 2 Source Code Review
I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language…
2032
I love coding in C
For the first time in almost a year, I brushed up on my C fundamentals and built a few toy programs. As I played around with pointers and printed out a memory location, I experienced a literal chill down my spine. I had almost forgotten how marvelous programming in this language was.
2033
Python is not a great language for data science
It may be a good language for data science, but it’s not a great one.
2034
Apple's use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17
Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17
2035
I accidentally used YAML.parse instead of JSON.parse and it worked
How I stumbled upon the fact that YAML is a superset of JSON.
2036
From Go on EC2 to Fly.io
How I switched hosting my Go-based side projects from Amazon EC2 to Fly.io, significantly simplified deployment, and saved a bit of cash while I was at it.
2037
Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
2038
Good and Bad Elixir
Words from Chris Keathley
2039
The future is specific
I’m going to make a bold claim: The future of tools isn’t in a better Eclipse or Visual Studio, it’s in easily created domain specific experiences.
2040
What's new in Emacs 31.1
Emacs 31.1 adds a slew of quality-of-life features. It retires its quirky unexec dumper; there are general improvements to tree-sitter, including a much-wanted auto-installer for grammars; and much more.