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How I've run major projects (2025)
focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 968 posts.
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DeepSeek-v4.1 Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression
A deep dive into the DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash technical report: CED, CSA2, HSI, Single-Pass mHC, Engram and FP4 KV Cache — how the KV cache was compressed to just 890 bytes per token.
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A whole boss fight in 256 bytes
Endbot is a complete audio-visual demo that fits in exactly 256 bytes . It runs under DOS (via DosBox-X) and renders in real-time: a robot sprite with progressive bullet damage, a growing explosion, a scrolling checkerboard landscape, and a MIDI soundtrack - all from a single tiny .com file.
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Zero-copy protobuf and ConnectRPC for Rust
As part of my work at Anthropic, I open sourced two Rust crates that fill a gap in the RPC ecosystem: buffa, a pure-Rust Protocol Buffers…
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Mounting tar archives as a filesystem in WebAssembly
How to use a file index to mount a tar.gz archive directly into the Emscripten virtual filesystem without extracting it
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If AI coding is lowering your code quality, you're not managing quality right
One common take on the coding agents that I see goes something like this: “Sure, AI helps you output more code, but won’t the quality suffer?”
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C array types are weird
C array types are weird. In this article I’ll explain what I find weird about them, what I’d do differently, and ramble on a few related things.
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Lines of Code Are Back (and It's Worse Than Before)
The metric we killed is back, and AI made it worse
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How to Implement an FPS Counter
TL;DR: Don’t base your FPS calculations on a specific number of frames. Instead, maintain a rolling window of frames that happened during the last second. Use precise timers. Read on for more details.
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Zigzag Decoding with AVX-512
I’ve been working on speeding up AVX-512 vertex decoding in meshoptimizer recently; in the process I stumbled upon two optimizations that I did not end up using but I thought they might be fun to write about! The optimizations that actually made it in require some higher level background / explanations that will have…
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AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
AI tools lower the barrier to producing code, not to building reliable systems. The hard part — maintaining alignment between specifications, tests, and implementation — has not gone away. Expertise still matters.
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Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
In 1582, under the inter gravissimas papal bull, the Catholic world transitioned from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar . This new calendar shortened the length of the year from 365.25 days to 365.2425 , a reduction of just 0.002% .
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The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?
A practical introduction to TLA+, why it matters for agentic coding, and how AI could take formal verification from models to machine-checked proofs and ultimately to verified software.
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The consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
the future of senior developers, junior developers, more on cognitive debt, DevEx versus AgentEx, the role of IDEs, consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
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Two studies in compiler optimisations
A deep dive into the intricacies of the LLVM optimisation pipeline.
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Pushing and Pulling: Three reactivity algorithms
It’s looking like I’m going to need to build a reactive engine for work, so I’m going to prepare for that by writing down what I know about them. I want to look at three ways of building reactive engines: push reactivity, pull reactivity, and the hybrid push/pull combination that is used in a bunch of web frameworks…
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Parsing Expression Grammar vs. Regexes: Building Org Parser in Lisp, Export HTML
Converting Org to HTML with (ice-9 peg) in Guile: OrgWebAlchemy
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The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing…
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Rathbun's Operator
First, I’m a human typing this post. I’m not going to tell you who I am. Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do during the last two weeks or so with the OpenClaw agent I set up, known as…
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From Rust to Ruby
Who does things like that?!? Apparently: me. I have my own project, written in Rust. Not a big one, mind you, maybe approx. 30k lines of code in total. Rust is verbose so it’s not really that impressive. I’ve put it aside for some time and was toying with local inference, LLMs, writing agents and my attention was…
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Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
If you do Linux systems programming, you will have likely pored over man pages, either on the command line or, my personal preference, using the excellent man7.org or linux.die.net. I’ve always seen …
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Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code
Parsing a statistics textbook with Deepseek OCR on Modal
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Gzip decompression in 250 lines of Rust
i wanted to have a deeper grasp of how compression works, so i wrote a gzip decompressor from scratch. the result is about 250 lines of rust that can decompress gzip from a file or stdin.
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C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper
If you're using Dapper with anonymous objects to query varchar columns, you're probably sending nvarchar(4000) parameters — causing CONVERT_IMPLICIT on every row and defeating your indexes. Here's the fix.
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Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
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The silent death of good code
I’ve been passionate about writing “Good Code™” since before I started my career, beginning way back when I was still a kid in middle school.