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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 994 posts.
People regularly go for complex test harnesses; and when you’re in an ecosystem, they can be a good fit. But outside ecosystems, it’s actually quite easy to produce a fairly good test harness.
UPDATE 2020-08-03 : I no longer stand by the content in this post. I think the overall sentiment is marginally accurate; however, the details in the post are incorrect (as many have pointed out over the years).
I’ve gotten really into writing parsers lately, and Rust has turned out to be the perfect language for that. In the course of my adventures, I came up with the following:
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A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch. Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's b...
If you don't you're not alone. Right now, as I'm typing this, 4 of the top 4 Google results for "find command linux" contain at least one example of the pattern illustrated by the command above.
Your laptop spends all day lying to you. If you want your code to run well on server hardware, best write it on server hardware.
What's the midpoint between 0 and infinity in Ruby? It's 1.5 for some reason. What's the reason you might ask? Read on to find out.
Articles on frontend development and more.
If you go beyond software, and frameworks, beyond test suites and sprints and Jira tickets, you will always find a problem that needs to be solved.
Repeatedly reaching for your mouse slows you down in the short term, and in the long term brings on health problems (RSI). To stay fast and healthy...
Update 7 May 2022: A followup to this post containing significant conceptual advance is Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust. I consider the Crochet experiment to be mostly negative, as there were a number of ergonomic and functional “paper cuts,” though several of the research goals were met, at least to some extent.
There are two types of engineers, the ones that can quickly do estimates and the ones that can’t. Are these people just smarter, or is there more to it? Enrico Fermi was a master at estimation Back of the envelope estimation is a skill that can be learned with practice. It becomes easier once you get familiar with…
Many years ago, I built what I believe was the best-selling BlackBerry app of all-time, BBSmart Email Viewer. It feels strange to write that, and it's not something I'd say I'm really known for outside of the small niche community of BlackBerry app developers that used to exist. But of course this had a huge impact on…
Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips…
You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been. – Maya Angelou CIDER started its life as an effort to replace a hacked version of SLIME1 with a proper environment for Clojure development on Emacs. Many of you probably don’t remember those days, but initially almost everyone was using a…
Every now and then I get questions on how to work with git in a smooth way when developing, bug-fixing or extending curl - or how I do it. After all, I work on open source full time which means I have very frequent interactions with git (and GitHub). Simply put, I work with git … Continue reading This is how I git →
Why ask this question? It's no secret that I want a Python implementation for WebAssembly [https://webassembly.org/]. It would not only get Python into the browser, but with the fact that both iOS [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/javascriptcore] and Android [https://developer.android.com/guide/webapps]…
Seam carving is a technique for content-aware resizing, which changes the size of an image while attempting to preserve the interesting content of the image. The basic idea behind the technique is to remove low-energy seams: paths of pixels that are similar to their surroundings. A removed seam can be either vertical…
Copying data wastes memory, and modifying/mutating data can lead to bugs. Learn how to implement a compromise between the two in Python: hidden mutability.
I was inspired by the release of Apple’s M1 ARM processor to tweet about the perils of lock-free programming which led to some robust discussion. The discussion went pretty well given the inanity o…
In my #rust2020 blog post , I mentioned rather off-handedly that I think the time has come for us to talk about forming a Rust foundation. I wanted to come back to this topic and talk in more detail about what I think a Rust foundation might look like. And, since I don’t claim to have the final answer to that question…
Background: Joystick Preventing Display Sleep A few months ago, I thought I ought to try Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. The facsimile of o...
A few months back I gave a talk in which I shared a list of my personal engineering axioms – things that, over the years, I've come to think of as generally true and useful to have in mind when writing code, building things, and working with others.
