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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time messing with x86_64 page tables, understanding address translation is not easy and when I started learning about it I felt like a lot of the material out there on how it works was hard for me to wrap my head around. So in this blog post I am going to attempt to provide a kind of “what I…
What makes a good API for a library? Or more importantly, what makes it bad? This talk discusses the principles of what goes into user-centered design, and how best to apply those principles when writing a Python library for fellow developers.
I was honored to present a talk on Ruby concurrency at RubyConf 2024. It represents a high-level distillation of much of my writing and research over the past year. The conference itself was great, and presenting was such a fun experience. Here is the talk, titled “In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby…
I have been doing Java in Neovim for quite a while at work, and it’s been a very pleasant experience. As Neovim usage grows (especially amongst the younger crowd), I want to share how I do it.
Things this developer thinks might be interesting to you.
In the context of out-of-order microarchitectures, I was under the impression that execution units remain occupied until the µop they’re processing is complete. This is often not the case.
An introduction to signals: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2023.
Would you like the design a web API that is reliable and pleasant to use? I have some ideas for you.
You may know me for my interactive tutorials. But before that, I was writing visual but non-interactive tutorials. In particular, there wasn’t a lot of information about A* on the web, so I decided to collect all my notes about pathfinding [1] together in one place in the 1990s. But then in the 2010s I started making…
The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
Building git for lawyers at Version Story (YC W21) — versionstory.com
Projects and thoughts from James Porter
Building software is hard. Oftentimes things that seem like they should be simple end up being way more complicated when you get into the details. ( OK, maybe this isn’t specific to software. )
There’s a whole lot of buzz around the new Qwen2.5-Coder Series of open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) LLM releases from Alibaba’s Qwen research team. On first impression it looks like …
I am somehow very late to learning CUDA. I didn’t even know until recently that CUDA is just C++ with a small amount of extra stuff. If I had known that there is so little friction to learnin…
A programming model for spatial canvases
Simulating an entire cell using kinetic parameters of reactions in a well-stirred environment
Over the years, I've read a lot of books on software engineering. Agile books in particular like to refute the "Waterfall Model". Every t...
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
A C program that writes "hello, world!" to the console using inline assembly instead of standard library functions, demonstrating direct system call invocation.
Introduction Today’s post will take us in a slightly different direction than the last few. Today’s post will be about hooking up some Python code to the X-Plane flight simulator to enable development of an autopilot using PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controllers. I’ve been a fan of flight simulators for…
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD
When Simplicity is Preferrable to Efficiency
Async/await, or "async IO", is a new-ish Rust added async/await in 2019. For comparison, C# added it in 2012, Python in 2015, JS in 2017, and C++ in 2020. language feature that lets our programs do more than one thing at a time. It's sort of an alternative to multithreading, though Rust programs often use both…
Division is quite an expensive operation. For instance, latency of the 32-bit division varies between 10 and 15 cycles on the Cannon Lake CPU, and for Zen4 this range is from 9 to 14 cycles. The latency of 32-bit multiplication is 3 or 4 cycles on both CPU models.
My main project is to create an executable spec of the Intel Architecture but, every now and then, I get to take a broader look at ISA specifications and think about the strengths and weaknesses of other ISA specs: what makes them work well; and what techniques they could borrow from other specifications. Earlier this…
What did you do at work today? How about last week? I spent a couple of days in quarterly business reviews, and wrapped up yearly planning activities for AWS Data Exchange and AWS Marketplace. I also added some unit tests to a project that I am onboarding into.
I adore Nerves. I recently joined the core team. And I'll be doing my best to help people get along with this lovely way to co-mingle hardware and massively concurrent reliable software.
