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Death by design patterns, or On the cognitive load of abstractions in the code
After many years coding in different teams — big and small — I think I can now finally explain to myself why and when do we need, or not…
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
602
Most UI applications are broken real-time applications
I’ve been programming for a long time. When I say long time, I mean decades, with an S. Hopefully that’s long enough. In that time my experience has primarily been programming for contemporary platforms, e.g. Linux, Windows, macOS on desktop-class or server-class CPU architectures. Recently, I embarked on building a…
603
My journey away from the JAMstack
The name is all but dead, nerfed by the company who invented it. Here’s why Netlify was ahead of its time and where everything went wrong.
604
TeamTopologies
A model that helps people design effective teams for software development.
605
Testing on production
It might seem like a click baity title but it’s not. Let me explain.
606
Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API
I've been operating Pushover 's public-facing API for over a decade now and I thought I'd pass on some advice for those creating a new API.
607
Go Testing by Example [video]
I opened GopherCon Australia in early November with the talk “Go Testing By Example”. Being the first talk, there were some A/V issues, so I re-recorded it at home and have posted it here:
608
Functional Programming – How and Why
Let's start with an example. In Advent of Code 2022 day 1 we get groups of numbers as input like: 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 ...
609
GPT-3 will ignore tools when it disagrees with them
Augmenting GPT-3 with tools is a popular technique right now. But is GPT-3 really using them?
610
Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard
The Guardian is one of my favorite news sources. I’m a subscriber (support news organizations!) and I read it daily. But it is not immune to errors, as this headline shows:68 °F above average is a …
611
SQL reserved words – An empirical list
These words cause problems as table or column name
612
CTEs as lookup tables
How to use a CTE instead of complicated CASE expressions
613
Leveling up in job interviews for software engineers (2022)
How to stand out in job interviews as an engineer.
614
My Node.js is a bit Rusty
Replacing an internal Node.js module with a native Rust module made a x25 perf boost. Let’s understand why.
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My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021)
Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I needed more to really understand the language. I wanted to work on a small project to get some hands-on experience, but…
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Unpacking Elixir: Observability
Elixir supports the usual supects of observability. Open Telemetry (OTel), log handlers, capturing metrics. And it does it well. This post will mostly focus on the observability you have on the BEAM that is either incredibly rare to see elsewhere or possibly entirely unique.
619
Displaying My Washing Machine's Remaining Time with Curl, Jq, and Pizauth
A couple of months ago our washing machine produced a considerable quantity of smoke when I opened its door, which I interpreted as a suggestion that a replacement was needed. After rummaging around the internet for advice, a couple of days later a new Miele washing machine took its place in our home.
620
Ban 1+N in Django
I always thought of 1+N as a thing that you just keep in your head, catch on code reviews or via performance regressions. This worked well for a long …
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Resilience requires helping each other out
A common failure mode in complex systems is that some part of the system hits a limit and falls over. In the software world, we call this phenomenon resource exhaustion, and a classic example of th…
623
Compiling Rust for .NET, using only tea and stubbornness
In this article, I describe my journey creating a barely functional rust backend enabling compilation for the .NET runtime (Usually used to run C# and F#).
624
Using RP2040 PIO to drive a poorly-designed displa
Dmitry.GR: Driving a poorly-designed display and touch board using no CPU at all
625
Never trust a programmer who says they know C++
I’ve been in an interviewing mindset for awhile and I’ve come to realize something important about C++ in particular. C++ is a “two peak” language. That is to say C++ is the only language I know of where two very different sets of programmers consider themselves well versed in the language. Let me show you in fake…
626
Bun, JavaScript, and TCO
Bun is a JavaScript runtime that just released version 1.0! Now you have three choices for running JavaScript outside of the browser: Node, Deno, and Bun. One of Bun's selling points is speed! It makes some interesting decisions to achieve this.
627
I cancelled my Replit subscription
I cancelled my annual Replit Hacker plan and I'll let it lapse at the end of December of 2023. Replit is a popular and growing multi lan...
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LLMs Unleashed: The Power of Fine-Tuning
Disclaimer: This article mentions https://terra-cotta.ai/, an LLM experimentation platform I am building Introduction ChatGPT, Bard, and other large language models (LLMs) are very useful for a wide variety of tasks from writing code to answering complex questions to aiding with education. However, these models are…
630
Back-end parallelism in the Rust compiler
This post describes some performance work I have been doing recently on rustc. I spent several weeks on a particular problem with only a small amount of success. I hope a write-up will be interesting and educational, and may even lead to suggestions that make things better. The post is aimed at readers with some…