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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 514 posts.

2020
365

Spark joy by running fewer tests

Developers write tests to ensure correctness and allow future changes to be made safely. However, as the number of features grows, so does the number of tests. Tests are a double-edged sword. On one hand, well-written ones catch bugs and maintain a program’s stability, but as the code base grows, a high number of…

366

Speeding up a Git monorepo

We migrated from Mercurial to Git in 2014 to improve local performance and began consolidating our repositories that hosted our backend code. But as this monorepo grew, we experienced Git performance issues that grew linearly with the number of files we added. Inconveniently, this problem was the most severe on…

369

Good coders borrow, great coders steal

Copying and pasting can be dangerous, but then again, so can many aspects of software development when done incautiously. In this post, I’ll take a look at what code copying actually means for software development, what good code theft means, and the pitfalls of copying badly.

371

Foreign data wrappers: PostgreSQL's secret weapon?

EnterpriseDB (“EDB”), the leader in accelerating Postgres® in the enterprise, today announced its acquisition of Splitgraph, an early-stage disruptor that provides a Postgres compatible serverless SQL API for building data driven applications from hundreds of datasources. This move is seen as a meaningful step in…

374

Fighting Rust's Expressive Type System

Herein I share an experienced developer's first foray into a real-world Rust project. It focuses closely on the type system, and the key insights I needed to begin "thinking in Rust". Written for those getting to grips with the language, it will be especially useful if your background isn't functional programming.

376

Programming at the REPL (2018)

Clojure REPLs are used for a broad spectrum of purposes, from learning the language to data exploration to live music performance. This chapter will provide some guiding principles for applying Clojure REPLs to the more common use case of pragmatic software development.

387

Taking PHP Seriously (2016)

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…