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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
Hello! This is part one of a short series of posts on writing a simple raytracer in Rust. I’ve never written one of these before, so it should be a learning experience all around. So what is a raytracer anyway? The short version is it’s a computer program that traces the paths of simulated rays of light through a…
Cross compilation is one of Go’s headline features. I’ve written about it a few times , and others have taken this work and built better tooling around it.
This is not a C tutorial; there are plenty of those on the web. The reader is assumed to have some basic knowledge of programming in general, and preferrably the C programming language in particular. Maybe you just finished reading a tutorial, and you would like to learn some more by studying other people's source…
An introduction to a new post series covering debugger basics.
About six months back, I wrote a post on how to use views in Postgres to encapsulate tables and create a versioned interface to a database. At the end of the…
Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you…
Most web developers I talk to these days love writing JavaScript with all the newest language features—async/await, classes, arrow functions, etc. However, despite the fact that all modern browsers can run ES2015+ code and natively support the features I just mentioned, most developers still transpile their code to…
As a developer, you have the power to change the world! You can write programs that enable new technologies. For instance, develop software to find an earlier diagnosis of diseases. But that’s not the only way. You might do it indirectly by creating projects that make people more productive and help them free up time…
A detailed explanation of the architecture I used to rebuild react
Writings about computing, agents, and the Internet.
How to stand out in job interviews as an engineer.
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techn…
You'd think that given the same bytes of input you'd get the same bytes of output. lol. lmao. No, you don't. It's complicated.
Replacing an internal Node.js module with a native Rust module made a x25 perf boost. Let’s understand why.
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Most of the projects I've been working on today have fairly strict code review policies. My work requires code review on most of our code, and as we bring on an army of interns for the summer, I've been responsible for reviewing lots of code. Additionally, about five months ago BarnOwl, the console-based IM client I…
We’ve been upgrading our frontend tech stack at Liferay Cloud this past year. Nifty tools we’ve adopted include:...
There are some topics which, if posted onto a forum or news site, cause programmers to spew out more blather than all the rest put together. Such topics include:
In 2014, it’s not OK if it’s hard for a developer to run a simple program from the command line.
How I taught my 7½ year old 4 bash commands in one hour
I had heard of it years ago, but never really gave it a lot of thought (or time) to it, despite being a huge fan of Common Lisp and a bit of a language polyglot. I think part of my initial reluctance may have been 'java' - as I would typically associate just the negatives to it (cumbersome language syntax, slow start…
