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Year 2038 problem is still alive and well
Largely because of a single code snippet used by many.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,001 posts.
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An M1 for Curl
A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development. Today it arrived at my home. An 8C CPU/16GB/1TB/8C GPU/1GbE model as per the sticker on the box. The m1 mac mini, still wrapped in plastic. Apple is not … Continue reading An m1 for…
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Finding Waldo in π
The SMBC comic Convert included as the “Votey button” a challenge to extract a Waldo visual from the digits of π.
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Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5
And other lessons learned from creating a popular open-source project (JSON5)
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Useful Python decorators for data scientists
I show toy implementations of Python decorator patterns that may be useful for Data Scientists.
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Go generics are not bad
When programming, we often need to write 'generic' functions where the exact data type is not important. For example, you might want to write a simple function that sums up numbers. Go lacked this notion until recently, but it was recently added (as of version 1.18). So I took it out for a spin. In … Continue reading…
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Gzip exceptions, but only on hot or rainy days
A debugging story about a mysterious C# gzip decompression exception and what actually caused it, with investigation steps and lessons learned.
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Explaining Code Using ASCII Art
I’ve done plenty of these, when I wanted to switch half my brain off but still do something time-consuming and fiddly, but still kind of productive. Very therapeutic!
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JSON and Virtual Columns in SQLite
Faster JSON handling in a relational database.
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Scala isn't fun anymore
I’ve just spent over a day, going to sleep at 1:00 am, to upgrade dependencies and fix eviction warnings in the build of a Scala project.
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Rethinking Visual Programming with Go
This is a blog version of the talk I gave at GopherCon Europe 2019 (Canary Islands Edition) , where I shared my thoughts on why Visual Programming Languages have failed and revealed for the first time my experiment on visualizing Go code.
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Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer
Disclaimer: prepare for hair-splitting and nitpicking
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Fast midpoint between two integers without overflow
Let us say that I ask you to find the number I am thinking about between -1000 and 1000, by repeatedly guessing a number. With each guess, I tell you whether your guess is correct, smaller or larger than my number. A binary search algorithm tries to find a value in an interval by repeating … Continue reading Fast…
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Writing like a pro with Vale and Neovim
Learn how to setup and use vale, a syntax-aware prose linter with neovim for technical writing be it personal blogs or technical documentation.
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Why I quit using SwiftUI
SwiftUI is currently the new trend in the Apple development world. And I wanted to give it a try. I did. However, in this post, I explain why I went back to AppKit for The Untitled Project’s authoring tools.
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Boring Python: Code quality
This is the second in a series of posts I intend to write about how to build, deploy, and manage …
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How the clipboard works
Reading how copy-paste works from the Wayland specification is non-trivial unless you understand a lot of how desktop computing works and Wayland internal. It took me quite a while to figure it all out, though once you get there, it seems quite obvious.
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Your computer is a distributed system
Many have observed that today's computers are distributed systems implementing the abstraction of the shared-memory multiprocessor. The wording in the title is from the 2009 paper " Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS? ". Some points from that and other sources:
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Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so
Unix counts time as seconds since the epoch. Seems straight forward. What could possibly go wrong?
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tolower() in bulk at speed
DNS servers often have to convert DNS names to their canonical lower case form. BIND has to do so a bit more than most because it tries to preserve the case of DNS names rather than canonicalizing them.
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I built a vector map from scratch
How I Built a Vector Map from Scratch
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What comes after Git
Git was born from the collaboration problems in the Linux kernel. Nearly a decade later, new problems arose when Kubernetes (the operating system of the cloud) brought open-source collaboration to a new level.
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Java’s Cultural Problem
Java is good by modern standards, from a technical perspective, the platform having received a lot of improvements from Java 8 to 17. Unfortunately, it still stinks, and the problem is its “enterprise” culture.
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UML: My Part in Its Downfall
In the last year or two there has been a slow but steady trickle of articles attempting to account for UML ’s lack of long-term success (if you have time for only one, I suggest Hillel Wayne’s article ). As fate would have it, I had some involvement in UML standardisation in the early 2000s, so I saw some of the…
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Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
I’ve used Hakyll as my static site generator for around 9 years now. Before that I think I used Jekyll and also more dynamic pages with Mojolicious in Perl and Kohana in PHP, but I can’t be completely sure as the git history doesn’t go back that far.
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Roaring bitmaps: what they are and how they work
A detailed primer on Roaring bitmaps explaining what they are, how they're different from traditional bitmaps, and how they work internally.
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