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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 531 posts.
Looking down from his perch on the edge of space [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHtvDA0W34I], Felix Baumgartner remarked: > Sometimes you have to be really high, to see how small you really are. It turns out that this feeling is a well documented phenomena dubbed the Overview effect [http:
I’ve used CoffeeScript for a few months now. Coming from Python, I felt that CoffeeScript was more concise than Javascript, so I decided to use it for a few small projects. Initially, it was a nice experience, but then I gradually realized that, while writing CoffeeScript code was very pleasant, reading it wasn’t so…
One of my least favorite parts about layout with CSS is the relationship of width and padding. You’re busy defining widths to match your grid or general column proportions, then down the line you start to add in text, which necessitates defining padding for those boxes. And ‘lo and behold, you now are subtracting…
I’m going to make a bold claim: The future of tools isn’t in a better Eclipse or Visual Studio, it’s in easily created domain specific experiences.
The benefits of getting to grips with Vim are immense in terms of editing speed and maintaining your “flow” when you’re on a roll, whether writing code, poetry, or prose, but because the learning curve is so steep for a text editor, it’s very easy to retain habits from your time learning the editor that stick with you…
Here are my raw notes from the keynote. Update: PG posted this talk in essay form. It’s not much longer than my notes; you should probably read that instead. big startup ideas are actually t…
I’ve used MongoDB for over a year at scale at both Heyzap and Bugsnag and I’ve found it to be a very capable database. As with all databases, there are some gotchas, and here is a summary of the things I wish someone had told me earlier.
I frequently see a problem when people (especially techies) try to teach programming to someone (especially non-techies). Many programming tutorials begin with basic programming principles: variables, loops, data types. This is both an obvious way to teach programming and almost certainly a wrong way to teach…
I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive.
Last month, I tweeted about one of my recent projects, the Hacker News mobile web app. It's a simple little app to read Hacker News' stories…
The books did make me think. A lot. A lot about a tool I use everyday… git http://git-scm.com .
Someone asked me an interesting question the other day: "How did you justify taking such a hu...
Since this post got quite popular I decided to incorporate some of the excellent suggestions posted in the comments, so this list now has more than …
The Light Table Playground is getting a huge update today that we’re really excited to show you. New to Light Table? It’s a new kind of reactive IDE, check out the original post to learn more.
Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with a few people buzzing around. As your eyes adjus…
Steve Huffman talks about Reddit’s approach to data storage in a High Scalability post from 2010. I was surprised to learn that they only have two tables in their database.
The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. Their attitudes might be summarized as:
