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Rust in an Instant
Personal website of Jan-Erik Rediger
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 994 posts.
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How you could have come up with Paxos yourself
In the field of computer science, the Paxos algorithm is notorious for how difficult it is to understand. I had to learn the Paxos algorithm in my distributed systems class. I even have "implemented" it by translating Leslie Lamport's TLA+ to Python. But I didn't understand it until much much later.
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Secure by Design
I really like Secure by Design. The key idea is that there is a big overlap between secure code and good software design. Code that is strict, clear and focused will be easier to reason about, and …
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SMT Solving on an iPhone (2018)
Why buy an expensive desktop computer when your iPhone is a faster SMT solver?
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Making Python Programs Blazingly Fast
<p> <i>Python</i> haters always say, that one of reasons they don't want to use it, is that it's <i>slow</i>. Well, whether specific program - regardle...
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Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry
Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Protobuf messages…
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I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser
In Denmark it is possible to register domains with funny characters such as æ, ø and å. And we do. One prominent example is our national portal for booking Covid-19 tests at https://coronaprøver.dk . Wikipedia calls these beasts Internationalised domain names , so they must indeed exist.
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Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions
C++ remains one of the leading programming languages in game development despite the emergence of new technologies and languages. Its flexibility, performance, and extensive ecosystem make it the preferred choice for building complex game systems, engines, and high-performance applications.
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C will never stop you from making mistakes
Short answer: because we said so.
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Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems
Patterns and structures of current operating systems and some thoughts about how that could be improved, with lessons learnt from Self, Smalltalk and other "structured" systems.
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The worst tool for the job
Using the best tool for a job may slow things down. It may be "best" in a sense you don't need. The actual best tool might be relatively crude.
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Towards Tactic Metaprogramming in Haskell
Isn’t it weird that we treat source code as text? That is, we have this extremely well-structured and strongly-typed object — the abstract syntax tree — that exists conceptually in our minds, and in actuality inside of our compiler, but for some reason we pretend it’s just a pile of bytes and edit it byte-by-byte…
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Cache Oblivious Algorithms
Cache-Oblivious Algorithms Cache-oblivious algorithms seemed incredible to me when I first heard about it in 6.854 (Advanced Algorithms). It’s relatively straightforward to imagine algorithms that utilizes information about page size $B$ and cache size $M$ to create efficient data structures. However, cache-oblivious…
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In Defense of the Modern Web
I expect I'll annoy everyone with this post: the anti-JavaScript crusaders, justly aghast at how much...
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Go modules have a v2+ problem
Go has a problem. Go modules place a strange naming requirement on modules version 2 or greater. Module names on modules v2+ must end in the major version ala …/v2 , and communication of this rule has been weak. It's non-obvious, and the community at large does not understand it.
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DRY Is a Trade-Off
DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself is frequently touted as a principle of software development. "Copy-pasta" is the derisive term applied to a violation of it, tying together the concept of copying code and pasta as description of software development bad practices (see also spaghetti code ).
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Build Your Own FPGA (2012)
The Open 7400 Logic Competition is a crowd-sourced contest with a simple but broad criteria for entry: build something interesting out of discrete logic chips. It's now in its second year, and this time around I was inspired to enter it.
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Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018)
AWK As A Major Systems Programming Language — Revisited
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Distri: 20x faster initramfs (initrd) from scratch
In case you are not yet familiar with why an initramfs (or initrd, or initial ramdisk) is typically used when starting Linux, let me quote the wikipedia definition: “[…] initrd is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, which may be used as part of the Linux startup process […] to make…
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I translated a simple C program to x86_64 and it was slower
A blog about computing and other fun.