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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,538 posts.
Like almost all rules, there are cases where breaking them is a good idea and seasoned writers may well object with "but" responses for some of these. Thus, consider the rules below as mental rumble strips - you should probably slow down and think if you encounter these cases.
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
Eric Merritt, Erlang and distributed systems expert, gives his views on BEAM languages, Hindley–Milner type systems and new technologies In this case, This is not a Monad tutorial interviewed Eric …
I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough,...
Christmas is coming up. When I used to work at a bank the entire month of December and a bit of January we were placed under “Change Freeze”. We weren’t allowed to deploy updates to our applications during this period. The thinking was: A lot of people are away over Christmas Application changes can lead to crashes…
As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project.
This is basically an expanded explanation of what I did after reading this tutorial by Marwan Burelle and then sitting down and trying to write my own implementation, so the steps are going to be fairly similar. The main implementation differences are that my version is simpler and more vulnerable to memory…
I’m very excited to announce that today I’m open-sourcing atool I’ve been working on for several months at Google.It’s called Bloaty McBloatface, and it lets...
Recently I read this beginners guide to extend Emacs. The guide is perfect for starting out with elisp and it shows a lot of care in teaching how to interact with Emacs.
Embed and run interactive code snippets entirely in your browser, no server required.
I’d like to share with you my latest project: Decktility!
In this tutorial we’ll discuss the ideas and concepts behind rendering water and then talk through some demo code.
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
Overconfident developers that choose to write their own cryptography code have plagued the information security industry since before it was even an industry. This in and of itself isn’t inhe…
In 1996, XML was invented. No sooner than it was created, it was adopted for all manner of misconceived applications for which it was a poor choice.
Next week, Mozilla will release Firefox 57. Also referred to as Firefox Quantum, from the project name we've used for all the work that has been put into making this the most awesome Firefox release ever. This is underscored by the fact that I've gotten mailed release-swag for the first time during my four years ……
Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of …
C++11 is the new standard of C++ that was released last year. Yes, I know that is now 2012, but compilers are just now starting to catch up and …
