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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.
Idempotence means duplicates don't matter. It means you can safely retry an operation with no issues. The classic example is the elevator button: you press it twice and it does not call two elevators. We explore why we would want that property in an email server.
Here are some tips and tricks I've learned for developing and deploying web applications written for node.js using Docker (2019 edition).
Silly, terrible, no-good very-bad jigsaw puzzles. Featuring Voronoi diagrams, KD-trees, and Clojure.
The execution of a program unfolds over some interval of time. The lifetime of every temporary resource (e.g., variable or object) is the time span between that resource’s “creation” and “destruction”. This lifetime is wholly contained within the typically-longer lifetime of the program.
Some time ago I blogged about some cool terminal plugins I was using in my Linux notebook. Also some awesome retro- emulator terminals j...
Hello, world.
Goroutines are a unusual and powerful programming language feature, so they are a tempting toy to play with, and they get a bit overused.
The GNU Unifont project is amazing. It contains every Unicode glyph in one single file! I am going to argue that you should bundle it with your apps, your operating systems, and - at a pinch - your websites. The Unifont is a perfect fallback font. If your app or website uses a Unicode character which isn't supported…
How I fell in love with Ruby
Over the past year I've been working on a minimal-dependency hobbyist computing stack (everything above the processor) called Mu . The goal is to:
Serving the right code to the right browsers can be tricky. Here are some options.
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys’19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs enviro…
Sharing and reusing memory buffers is inescapable if we want high performance. It is a sharp but powerful tool.
I have a lengthy TODO.org of things I might eventually implement for Emacs, most of which are not exactly useful, are challenging to do or fulfill both conditions. A NES emulator fits all of these criteria neatly. I’ve kept hearing that they can run on poor hardware and learned that the graphics fit into a tiled model…
In a recent blog post entitled “Monorepos: Please don’t,” Matt Klein discusses the pros and cons - as it turns out, mostly cons in his view - of monorepos. The long and short of it is that he thinks that they are not a good fit for most teams. After thinking about this question for a few years I have come to the…
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This article explores different ways to create iterators and iterable values in Javascript for dynamic sequence generation, specifically using functions, iterators, iterables and generators. It provides code examples for implementing the Fibonacci sequence with each approach.
This is a program that determines many properties of the C compiler and machine that it is run on, such as minimum and maximum [un]signed char/int/long, many properties of float/ [long] double, and so on.
We often have to write code using permissive programming languages like C and C++. They tend to generate hard-to-debug problems that can crash your applications. Thankfully, many compilers offer "sanitizers". I discussed them in my post No more leaks with sanitize flags in gcc and clang. I strongly encourage the use…
2018 is an exciting time to be a programmer, with so many good “full service” programming languages to choose from: C, C++ 2017, Go, Python, Rust and who knows Swift too. Programming languages are complicated beasts - even the simplest languages have specifications that run (or would run) in the hundreds of pages, and…
Mergeable replicated data types Kaki et al., OOPSLA’19 This paper was published at OOPSLA, but perhaps it’s amongst the distributed systems community that I expect there to be the greatest in…
Then Back in the 2000s, we wrote applications in layers. Presentation layer, client, data transfer, API, business logic, data access, database. We maintained strict separation bet ween these layers…
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 6. LLVM system calls
Many people who use Rust for a bit - especially those who like the language but do not fall in love with it - feel a sense that there must be a smaller, simpler variation on the same theme which would maybe be a little less powerful, but would also be much easier to use. I agree with them, but I think they are almost…
Some thoughts on Conway's Law and its effect on the software stack and open source ecosystem.
