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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 894 posts.
Diving into the world of Hash Tables and understanding the underlying mechanics is extremely interesting, and very rewarding. So let's get into it and get started from the beginning. They are used commonly in algorithm design.
This time we'll focus on Linux's select(2) successor - the epoll(2) I/O multiplexing syscall.
Introduction to parser combinators. Understand this functional programming concept for building parsers from smaller components.
Recently Julia Evans wrote an excellent post about debugging a segfault in Rust. (Go read it, it’s good) One thing it mentioned was I think “ …
After my recent vitriol about unit testing, a couple of people sent me Why TDD is Crap as a thorough debunking of TDD and unit testing. As someone very interested in software correctness, I ended up writing a debunking of his debunking. Transcriptions will be in quotes, my responses below. Some important notes: From…
Several months ago, I introduced Gnirehtet , a reverse tethering tool for Android I wrote in Java.
A solid text editor is a developer’s best friend. You use it constantly and it becomes like a second pair of hands. The keyboard commands you use daily become so engrained in your muscle memory that you stop thinking about them entirely.
I doubt there has ever been a time when software architecture was seen as a raging success. The “three-tier architecture” of the web has held up extremely well and is an excellent place for many people to start. The “12 Factor App” approach has encouraged developers to adopt practices that make deployment and scaling…
For over twenty years the Java SE Platform and the JDK have evolved in large, irregular, and somewhat unpredictable steps. Each feature release has been driven by one or a few significant features, and so the schedule of each release has been adjusted as needed — sometimes more than once! — in order to accommodate the…
The article is a summary of my lessons learned from On Writing Well by William Zinsser. By providing a summary I hope to help other developers to improve their writing. Apart from that it helps me to memorize my lessons learned.
We’re going to reproduce some results from papers on filesystem robustness that were written up roughly a decade ago : Prabhakaran et al. SOSP 05 paper , which injected errors below the filesystem and Gunawi et al. FAST 08 , which looked at how often filesystems failed to check return codes of functions that can…
Today I finally released the project I’ve been working on for the last two years at MIT CSAIL : An HTML-based language for creating (many kinds of) web applications without programming or a server backend. It’s named Mavo after my late mother ( Ma ria V er o u), and is Open Source of course (yes, getting paid to work…
Django is a powerful framework used in many great projects. It provides many batteries, that speed up development and therefore reduces the price of it. When a project becomes large and is used by many users you inevitably will run into performance problems. In this guide, I will try define potential problems and how…
When the textile industry arose in the 18th century, craft was the norm in manufacturing. As the industrial revolution progressed, one after another sector of the economy made the transition from c…
This is a code-reading and exploration post about the WebSockets side of Phoenix. It builds upon some of the tracing techniques showcased in the previous post, to observe some of the internals of Phoenix. It also features some tricks I commonly employ to debug WebSocket related issues. The title and nature of this…
In the previous post we looked at how to emulate a CHIP-8 CPU with Common Lisp. But a CPU alone isn't much fun to play, so in this post we'll add a screen to the emulator with Qt .
We ran into a big blocker when designing SpriteBox Coding, a learn-to-code game for kids ages 5+. For some kids, code was simply…
In the past five years or so, while the web development world was going mad with the JavaScript revolution – I stayed mostly indifferent, occupying myself with backend work and distracting myself with things like Kubernetes .
In the last few months I taught three graduate mini-courses about string diagrams and graphical linear algebra – at Phd Open in Warsaw, a winter school in Estonia, and a graduate school in Le…
I recently had a problem where part of the solution was to do a series of pointer accesses that would walk around a chunk of memory in pseudo-random order. Sattolo's algorithm provides a solution to this because it produces a permutation of a list with exactly one cycle, which guarantees that we will reach every…
This Re-frame tutorial walks you through the main parts of Re-frame's structure, how they work together, and how they help you succeed in the long run building your single page application.
Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) thinks that defects in safety-critical systems are caused by a lack of developer professionalism. I think he's wrong.
RECENTLY I've been paying attention to the BuckleScript compiler from OCaml to JavaScript (ES5, to be exact). I'm seeing some significant a...
Earlier this month I wrote about how Windows 10 holds a lock during too much of process destruction, which both serializes this task and causes mouse-cursor hitches and UI hangs (because the same l…
