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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
Today I'm discussing a trivially simple technique that I've rarely seen used in production codebases. In programming, we often need to deal with simple values that can be represented by simple, generic types built into our programming language or provided by libraries: types like integer, string, or UUID. In any
A while back, I worked on a RISC-V-based userspace simulator for fun. In doing so, taught myself a lot more than I wanted to know about what happens in-between when the Kernel is asked to run a program, and when the first line of our program’s main function is actually executed. Here’s a summary of that rabbit hole.
Apple’s Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. The deeper failure is an industry shipping more software while producing fewer engineers capable of fixing it.
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world. Free and unlimited, for both public and private notes. Comprehensive Markdown support, including syntax highlighting for almost any language. Plus …
Yes I know about that one talk from Rob Pike.
For my day job , I need to build and run a Docker Compose project. However, because Docker doesn’t play well with nftables and I prefer a rootless + daemonless approach, I’m using Podman .
Why splitting your codebase too early can quietly destroy your team’s velocity — and what to do instead.
Frivilous dependencies are the enemy of maintainability.
Using logic programming to beat the game
I started reading software blogs before I got my first programming job 20 years ago. At this point, I've read thousands of blog posts and essays, but a small handful stuck in my mind and changed the way I think about software.
The power of Zig's comptime code execution
I found out about pool allocators some time ago, and I really liked its simplicity and high performance, so I decided to write my own. This article was initially inspired by Dmitry Soshnikov’s article . It’s also worth mentioning that this article was discussed in Hacker News .
Where to focus investments to best leverage AI tooling
Review: It's a history text, not a CS text
Due to a simple bug, Screen Studio app did generate over 2 petabytes of network traffic
*on macOS with an M3 chip *slightly more than 1%, on a specific benchmark, without any new unsafe code A while ago, memorysafety.org announced a contest for …
Build stateful HTMX applications using URL parameters as your state store, creating naturally bookmarkable and shareable interfaces
As I’m getting older I look back on all the things I’ve done as a creative developer, and I see so many cool projects! But I never wrote down any development
I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it. This post is a bit of a rant on my frustrations with code optimization…
So! Suppose you’re an intrepid engineer in a nascent Developer Productivity team. Your engineering organization has decided that it wants to move towards a monorepo . You’ve heard the stories told of Google, Meta, Uber - each a large technology company with developer productivity organizations consisting of hundreds…
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
You've probably heard of stream ciphers, but what about a scream cipher 😱? Today I learned there are more “Latin capital letter A” Unicode characters than there are letters in the English alphabet....
"I’ve had enough reasonable file formats fired at me in my time to tell you that wasn’t one" - Sam Fisher
An in-depth, personal journey recreating Daft Punk’s “Something About Us” in Ableton Live 12 — track by track. From synths to talkbox guitars, a nostalgic dive into French Touch culture, sound design, and the joys of music production.
In this post I’ll just rambling about ASN.1; parts of the compiler implementation, and some of the tool’s output rather than the tool itself as its still too WIP to really advertise on its own yet.
Many command line utilities support short form options (-f) and long form options (--force). Short form is for interactive usage. In scripts, use the long form.
