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Throw away your first draft of your code
The next time you start on a major project, I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all . Just throw it away.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,534 posts.
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Python built-ins worth learning
Update: You can find a newer version of this article on Python Morsels. In every Intro to Python class I teach, there’s always at least one “how...
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Git Undo
Tell me if you recognize this scenario: you’re in the middle of rewriting your local commits when you suddenly realize that you have gone too far and, after one too many rebases, you are left with a history that looks nothing like the way you wanted. No? Well, I certainly do. It was in one of those moments of despair…
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Useful GCC warning options not enabled by -Wall -Wextra
Note: This blog post was written for GCC 7. Later versions of the compiler may have added some of these warnings to -Wall or -Wextra . ...
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GitHub Stale Bots – A False Economy
Stale Bot’s are a type of automated bot on Github, which locks issues which are “stale” (as in have no recent activity). This seems like a helpful tool at first, but in reality it’s terrible for all p
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A decade of developing a programming language
In 2013, I had an idea: "what if I were to build my programming language?". Back then my idea came down to "an interpreted language that mixes elements from Ruby and Smalltalk", and not much more.
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How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development
Updated 2026-07-10 for the agent-teams era. Originally published September 2025. A subagent in Claude Code is a separate agent your session spawns to do a...
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Post-REST
More or less all the big APIs are RESTful these days. Yeah, you can quibble about what “REST” means (and I will, a bit) but the assertion is broadly true. Is it going to stay that way forever? Seems unlikely. So, what’s next?
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I just need a programmer
I first became acquainted with Pat Conroy's work when, as a freshman in college, I watched The Great Santini as a requirement for one of my honors courses. This film struck me as both sad and hopeful. Since then, I have seen a couple of other movies adapted from his novels.
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Equations True Computer Science Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know
This idea is a complete rip off an article that appeared in Wired a little while ago and it got me thinking what would my list for Compu...
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Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Arena allocator tips and tricks
Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to arena allocation . With practice, it’s effective, simple, and fast; typically as easy to use as garbage collection but without the costs. Depending on need, an allocator can weigh just 7–25 lines of code — perfect when lacking a runtime . With the core details of my own…
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Developer Philosophy
Amazing as it may seem after all these years, there are still junior developers in the world. A few weeks ago at work we had a talk where senior developers (including me) were invited to spend around five minutes each talking about our personal software development philosophies....
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ClojureScript Year in Review
It’s been a very exciting year for ClojureScript. It’s clear that things have been accelerating and here is a personal selection of highlights:
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Lifestyle programming
“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” ― Bob Dylan I am a lifestyle programmer. I run a one-man software product bus…
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Reimplementing “git clone” in Haskell from the bottom up (2013)
In order to give some structure to my ongoing investigation of git’s data structures, protocols and implementation I decided to re-implement git clone without using any of git’s plumbing commands or any of the existing git libraries. Along the way I tried to keep some implementation notes that should help to…
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Creating a Git Commit: The Hard Way
Let's create a Git commit using Git's low-level (plumbing) commands
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RISC-V OS Using Rust: Memory Management Unit
From the operating system's point of view, we have a large pool of memory from some starting address to some ending address. We can use our linker script (the virt.lds file) to provide us symbols representing the address of the starting and ending points.
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Complexities of e-mail validation logic
Nope, you don't know how to validate an email address. Even if you think you'd get the domain part right, fuggeddabout the local part. Seriously.
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We need less powerful languages
We need languages and systems that are less powerful, not more powerful, and easy ways to create and use such languages.
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The new wave of React state management
Understand the core problems state management libraries need to solve. And how the proliferation of modern libraries address them in new ways.
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Rust compiler performance
Perhaps the most often repeated complaint about Rust is its slow feedback loop and long compilation times. I hear about it all the time; in Rust podcasts, blog posts, surveys, conference talks or offline discussions. I also regularly complain about it, being a Rust user myself!
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Distributed systems programming has stalled
Over the last decade, we’ve seen great advancements in distributed systems, but the way we program them has seen few fundamental improvements. While we can sometimes abstract away distribution (Spark, Redis, etc.), developers still struggle with challenges like concurrency, fault tolerance, and versioning. There are…
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Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used
A developer's lament about Xcode's opaque errors, unreadable project files, and Apple's culture of pretending everything is fine.
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Reverse-engineering my speakers' API to get reasonable volume control
I got some fancy new speakers last week. They’re powered speakers and they have streaming service integrations built in, unlike the 35-year-old passive speakers I’m upgrading from. Overall they’re great! But they’re so loud that it’s difficult to make small volume adjustments within the range of safe volume levels for…
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Bash Error Handling
Here's a preview from my zine, Bite Size Bash ! If you want to see more comics like this, sign up for my saturday comics newsletter or browse more comics !
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Breaking the web with hash-bangs
Update 10 Feb 2011 : Tim Bray has written a much shorter, clearer and less technical explanation of the broken use of hash-bangs URLs . I thoroughly recommend reading and referencing it.