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Switching Costs in Software Development
The story of why it is important to make sure that it is easy to switch from one service to another.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,304 posts.
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Using React Native: One Year Later
This is the story of how we assessed and refactored two video players into one, cut the player code each product maintained by up to 94%, and swapped to the new player without disruption to any users.
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Modern C is now feature complete
You find the latest version of my book at the usual place at This now contains all the material that I plan to put into it. New are “experience” parts about performance, function-like m…
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C++ Has Become More Pythonic (2014)
C++ has changed a lot in recent years. The last two revisions, C++11 and C++14, introduce so many new features that, in the words of Bjarne Stroustrup, “It feels like a new …
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CockroachDB Skitters into Beta
We introduced Cockroach Labs last June with a simple yet ambitious mission: Make Data Easy. We are now thrilled to launch CockroachDB beta.
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V8 JavaScript Engine: V8 Release 5.4
V8 v5.4 comes with performance improvements and reduced memory consumption.
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Win32 and .NET desktop apps can now be published in the Windows Store
At Build 2016 we announced the Desktop App Converter, enabling developers to bring their existing desktop apps and games over to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and then extend it with UWP functionality. With this, we’ve enabled the path to migrate an app or game to all Windows 10 devices over time – including…
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A Simple Makefile for Medium-Sized C/C++ Projects
A simple Makefile for C or C++ that automatically finds sources, determines include flags, and sets up header dependencies.
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CHIP-8 in Common Lisp: The CPU
A while back I decided to try to write a Game Boy emulator in Common Lisp based on this series of articles . I made some good progress but eventually got bogged down because I was trying to learn a bunch of complex new things at once:
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Cygwin library now available under GNU LGPL
Today, we’re pleased to announce that the next release of the Cygwin library (version 2.5.2) will be available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3. The Cygwin library is the core of the Cygwin project, which includes a distribution of the popular GNU tools and other open source tools designed…
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Python 3.6 – Asynchronous Comprehensions
PEP 492 and PEP 525 introduce support for native coroutines and asynchronous generators using async / await syntax. This PEP proposes to add asynchronous versions of list, set, dict comprehensions and generator expressions.
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URL Parsing in WebKit
URLs have been used for decades now and you'd would think they would have consistent behavior…
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Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
From now on, I won’t be building any more native apps. All my apps going forward will be progressive web apps. Progressive web apps are web…
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The Sad State of the Backbone Ecosystem
For the past 2 years, ~90% of my coding time has been spent working on a large scale Backbone.js app. In February 2014, the Backbone community was in a fairly good place. The core library had reached 1.0 the previous year and had a strong team around it. Marionette had emerged as a de-facto standard for web…
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Zeroing Memory is Hard: VC++ 2015 arrays
Quick, what’s the difference between these two C/C++ definitions of initialized local variables? char buffer[32] = { 0 };char buffer[32] = {}; One difference is that the first is legal in C a…
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A bit of background for the unified C++ call proposal
C++ provides two calling syntaxes, x.f(y) and f(x,y). This has bothered me for a long time. I discussed the problem in the context of multimethods in D&E in 1994, referring back to a proposal by Doug Lea from 1991, and again in 2007. Each of the syntaxes has its virtues, but they force design decisions on people…
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How We Automate Our Infrastructure
Explore technical topics, solutions, and resources for building with Twilio – and beyond.
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Emacs vs. WebStorm for Node.js Development
The pros and cons of both Emacs and WebStorm for Node.js development.
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A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch
This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first post in the series presents the technique and explains the problem it intends to solve. It uses C++ as the…
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Making 1M requests with Python-aiohttp
In this post I’d like to test limits of python aiohttp and check its performance in terms of requests per minute. Everyone knows that asynchronous code perf...