751
Rust, a Raspberry Pi and Addressable LEDs
Tom Arrell's blog. Tom is a Software Engineer who writes about programming, embedded and electrical projects, and life.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.
752
PANE: Programming with visible data
PANE is a live, functional programming environment built around data-visibility. In PANE, all intermediate values are visible by default, and you construct a program by acting on these concrete values.
753
Functional Imperative Programming with Elixir (2018)
Stuff about things
754
Solving Programming Puzzles Without Using Your Brain
This post is a write-up of a solution to part of a programming puzzle I did yesterday. It’s a little different than the usual “solution + theory” approach, though: I’m going to talk about the actual steps you’d need to take to get to the solution (i.e. what to google, what intermediate code looks like, etc.). Often…
755
Maybe We Should Stop Creating Inscrutable CLIs
In the original Unix tradition, command-line options are single letters preceded by a single hyphen…The original Unix style evolved on slow ASR-33 teletypes that made terseness a virtue; thus the single-letter options.
756
757
The challenges of teaching software engineering
I've just finished teaching a four-day course introducing software engineering for the first time. My plan is to refine the course (I'm teaching it again in October), and it will eventually become the basis for doctoral training programmes in research software engineering at Oxford, and part of a taught Masters. My…
758
Things I Enjoy in Rust: Error Handling
Things I enjoy in Rust:
759
Loop invariants can give you coding superpowers
A loop invariant is a simple yet powerful tool for designing, testing, modifying, documenting and proving code correct.
760
Switching from Common Lisp to Julia (2017)
I have written this post for developers in the Common Lisp community who asked why I am switching to Julia. It may only be relevant for the small set of people who use Common Lisp for scientific computing.
761
Vignette: add photos to your contacts by searching public social media profiles
I've released my new iOS app, Vignette.
762
On Technical Writing
How I make it work (or not)
763
Picolibc – Libc for Embedded Systems
I wrote a couple of years ago about the troubles I had finding a good libc for embedded systems , and for the last year or so I've been using something I called 'newlib-nano', which was newlib with the stdio from avrlibc bolted on. That library has worked pretty well, and required very little work to ship.
764
Applied Monotonicity: A Brief History of CRDTs in Riak
RiakAround 2013, Riak was at the forefront of Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) development with the engineers at Basho Technologies working hard to integrate efficient, usable CRDTs from t...
765
766
Dreaming of a Parser Generator for Language Design
Trying to design a new programming language, I’m faced with the question of how to implement a parser for it. Various parser generators are available and sup...
767
If you want developers to adopt your software, make it less risky (2017)
Understanding how the academic community understands software adoption.
768
JSON on the Command Line with Jq
A series of how to examples on using jq, a command-line JSON processor
769
770
A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (1999)
If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote.
771
Object-Oriented Programming and Essential State
Back in 2015, Brian Will wrote a provocative blog post: Object-Oriented Programming: A Disaster Story . He followed it up with a video called Object-Oriented Programming is Bad , which is much more detailed. I recommend taking the time to watch the video, but here’s my one-paragraph summary:
772
Building a 64-bit aarch64 kernel and userspace for the Raspberry Pi 4
I’ve recently been tinkering around with using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop computer. The Pi 4 is fairly powerful; very sufficient for web browsing, audio, video, and terminal use for programming.
773
What Is Zig's Comptime?
Let's take a quick look at what compile-time execution looks like in Zig.
774
Avoiding Instruction Cache Misses
Excessive instruction cache misses are the kind of a performance problem that's going to appear only in larger codebases. In this article, I'm describing some ideas on how to deal with this issue.
775
Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir
Today, I'm publishing a new book: Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir . It's my third book, the second one that is not self-published.
776
I don't want to be a full-fullstack developer
In the current year web developers are regarded as Jacks of all trades, they gotta do everything from manual testing to frontend ninjutsu, but is it worth it?
777
Alan Kay and Missing Messages
Many people struggled with my article about Alan Kay and OO programming, so let's talk about the main objection.
778
A Codebase Is an Organism (2014)
Here's what no one tells you when you graduate with a degree in computer science and take up a job in software engineering:
779
Reflections on Learning Rust by Building Punchtop
To learn Rust, I implemented an audio game. There were some things I liked and some things I didn't. Some things were easy and some were hard. And there were plenty of libraries that were a joy to use.
780