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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 808 posts.
The Visitor Pattern is one of the most mis-understood of the classic design patterns. While it has a reputation as a slightly roundabout technique for doing simple processing on simple trees, it is actually an advanced tool for a specific use case: flexible, streaming, zero-overhead processing of complex data…
This document comes with a companion example program, available as one file or as multiple files (zipped) .
Agile Software Development may be mainstream, but much of what's done is faux-agile, and we need to push back.
Flattening a single very hot vertical Redis node into a horizontal Redis Cluster at Stripe.
Fast programs are always fast, slow programs are slow even on a most powerful computers. Knowing that fast solution exists makes slow one plain wrong.
Why it makes sense to model APIs as graphs, and what GraphQL can do for us to help with discovery, batch operations, and gradual enhancement.
As I listen to “Soup” by Can I’m reminded of the time when Alan Kay took some time to post on Hacker News addressing his thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming. For raw context read the original thread, but in this post I’ll attempt to annotate some of what was posted. For the purpose of this post…
In this series of posts, I am going to create a clone of the classic arcade game, space invaders, in C++ using only a few dependencies. In this post I will set up a window with an OpenGL 3.3 context u
I could write a lot of things about the Github acquisition by Microsoft. About Github's embrace and extend of git, and how it passed unnoticed by people who now fear the same thing now that Microsoft is in the picture. About the stultifying effects of Github's centralization, and its retardant effect on general…
A few years ago I started to work on an MPEG1 Video decoder, completely written in JavaScript. Now, I finally found the time to clean up the library, improve its performance, make it more error resilient and modular and add an MP2 Audio decoder and MPEG-TS demuxer. This makes this library not just an MPEG decoder, but…
This is an essay I wrote early-2016. After battling with soundness vs. usability in Typed Clojure for many years, I was starting to reconsider the “obviously wrong” approach of baking unsoundness into the type system from the get-go. I look at some historical examples of intentional unsoundness in type systems, and…
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
I was planning to make pulled pork the next day. That evening I set up the Weber kettle, got out the bag of charcoal and some chunks of apple wood, and laid everything out. Mise en place , as they say. I’d be waking up at 7am the next morning to light it up, and I didn’t trust my sleepy self to remember everything.
Computers store data as streams of bits. Binary files like image, audio or video files are allowed to contain just about any sequence of bits. However, we also often use text formats; for example, web pages and emails are required to be text. So how do we send images by email? How do we embed … Continue reading…
Let me assure you, the "fluxcapacitor" project is very interesting. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to describe what it does. For this project I completely fail the elevator pitch .
Emacs 26.1 was recently released . As you would expect from a major release, it comes with lots of new goodies. Being a bit of an Emacs Lisp enthusiast , the two most interesting new features are generators ( iter ) and native threads ( thread ).
React 16.3 added a new Context API – new in the sense that the old context API was a behind-the-scenes feature that most people either didn’t know about, or avoided using because the docs said to avoid using it.
Since February 2016, I have been participating in DIYRobocars meetups here in the SF Bay Area, wherein a bunch of amateur roboticists compete in autonomous time trials with RC cars. I had been doing very well in the competition with essentially just a glorified line-following robot, but have lately upgraded to a full…
Vyacheslav Egorov, who goes by mraleph on the Web, wrote a responseto my article “Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly”titled “Maybe you don’t nee...
When I got started using the Datomic database, I remember someone describing it to me as 'Event Sourcing without the hassle'. Having built Event Sourcing systems both with and without Datomic, I think this is very well put, although it might not be obvious, especially if you don't have much experience with Datomic.
This is quite a popular cartoon. I posted this in a comment on why programmers wear headphones a...
Sketches of Elixir : Friends, I am now at least in this respect a rare breed: an Elixir programmer who has never written Ruby. I was never a professional Erlang programmer. I cut my teeth on Python
