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Backtrack-Free Cursive
Making English more enjoyable to write.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,534 posts.
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Bash patterns I use weekly
5 bash tricks I find myself using often that I wish I'd discovered sooner.
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Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons
I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them: Here’s one for the…
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Serialization Is the Secret
If a value mutates in the forest with no one to see it, does it really mutate?
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Digital signatures and how to avoid them
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is: A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a messag…
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Prince Of Persia Code Review
On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. Even though it is the Apple II version written in 6502 assembly language, it was a pleasant experience to dive in the code of that mythical game: As usual there were many fascinating sofware wizardries to discover. The Apple II apparent poor…
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Clasp – A Common Lisp with LLVM back end and interoperation with C++
Hello, everyone! Click here for up to date build instructions Today I am happy to make the first release of the Common Lisp implementation “Clasp”. Clasp uses LLVM as its back-end and generates nat…
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A byte string library for Rust
bstr is a byte string library for Rust and its 1.0 version has just been released ! It provides string oriented operations on arbitrary sequences of bytes, but is most useful when those bytes are UTF-8. In other words, it provides a string type that is UTF-8 by convention , where as Rust’s built-in string types are…
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Finding Free Food with Python
If you live in a major city, there’s a good chance you’ve used (or at least heard of) food delivery services like Postmates, GrubHub, or DoorDash. These services are great for times when I’m behind on groceries or when I’m getting some late night studying in before a big midterm or final. The only problem with these…
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Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
Personal webpage of Fabian Mentzer.
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Building a Distributed Log from Scratch, Part 1: Storage Mechanics
The log is a totally-ordered, append-only data structure. It’s a powerful yet simple abstraction—a sequence of immutable events. It’s something that programmers have been using for a very long time, perhaps without even realizing it because it’s so simple. Whether it’s application logs, system logs, or access logs…
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Java 26 is here
Java 26 is here, and its main purpose seems to be to provide a solid foundation for future things to come. It comes with a few new features, some performance improvements and multiple enhancements that mention Project Valhalla as the inspiration for their existence. This post has all the info!
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Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets
A while back I wrote that Robert Martin was ruining software by being too good at programming. That was supposed to be a joke. Since then he’s done his damndest to actually ruin software by telling people they’re doing it wrong. His most recent response where he yells at software correctness was the breaking point for…
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How to zero a buffer
Now, we don't want to truly change the observable behaviour of our software — but fortunately the C standard has a more liberal concept of "observable" than most people. In particular, the C standard states that the observable behaviour includes accesses to volatile objects . What is a volatile object, you ask? It is…
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How to do distributed locking
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
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Async Rust doesn't have to be hard
An article titled Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming came out today and it's getting a lot of attention. I have a feeling that it's viewed in a wrong context, so I'd like to comment on the issue raised there.
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The microservices cargo cult
Microservices are awesome. We know this because of all the success stories that are circulating lately. The news is full of such stories, of people taking large, monolithic codebases, breaking them up, adding HTTP APIs and enjoying all the benefits.
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Remember when people tracked bugs?
I've done some well-known bitching about the halfassed and haphazard way that Open Sores projects have handled their bugs in the past, but man, things have only gotten worse since then. I mean, projects used to actually have bug databases. Boy, those were the days. Failing that, developers used to put their email…
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The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
When was the first time you had to use LaTeX? If you are like most people, it was probably suddenly forced upon you during your first math or CS class where you had to start writing proofs, with minimal guidance on how to get started. Unfortunately, this meant that while many people have good operational knowledge of…
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Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers (2010)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Lessons Learned: A Year with a Large AngularJS Project
After a year of working with a large AngularJS project, I thought I’d share a few of the lessons that I learned in the process. Firstly, I love AngularJS. It suits my needs exceedingly well, and I expect it will be my goto for the forseeable future when I need a solid framework for “thick client” single page…
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Levels of Agentic Engineering
AI's coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That gap closes in levels — 8 of them. Here's the progression from tab complete to autonomous agent teams.
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Basic Concepts in Unity for Software Engineers
Unity game development guide for software engineers. Start from first principles with scenes, game objects, components, and serialization.
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Bus Number – The GitHub plugin my coworkers asked me not to write
This blog post was written together with <mclare> , who made coooool visualizations like the picture at the end of the post!
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How to trim video clips instantly without reencoding
How to save hours by trimming videos without reencoding or rerendering.
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A Short Guide to Minimal Web Development (2018)
There’s an art and even a bit of magic around simple frontend code. Writing such code comes with a few preconditions: perhaps a firm understanding of core technologies, a lot of practice, public scrutiny, and then some. Thoughts.
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Learn regular expressions in about 55 minutes
// For flipping between displayed things const toggle = id => { const element = document.getElementById(id) element.style.display = element.style.display === "none" ? "" : "none" } Regular expressions ("regexes") are supercharged Find/Replace string opera...
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If all the world were a monorepo
The R ecosystem and the case for extreme empathy in software maintenance