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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,529 posts.
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Greppability is an underrated code metric
Keeping your codebase searchable will make your maintenance life easier in the long run. A collection of guidelines to keep your code base greppable
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A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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Apple's Software Quality Crisis
Tim, I think we are not cooking
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How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
On 22 June 2016, Unicode version 9.0 was published . As part of that, 4 new symbols were introduced – and another one was re-purposed.
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CRDTs are the future
I saw Martin Kleppmann’s talk a few weeks ago about his approach to realtime editing with CRDTs, and I felt a deep sense of despair. Maybe all the work I’ve been doing for the past decade won’t be part of the future after all, because Martin’s
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On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
On this week's Under the Radar, Marco and Dave eloquenty discussed Apple's piss-poor documentation.
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We need visual programming. No, not like that
Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?
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Can't you just right click?
In 2012, Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X (now macOS). When you try to run Mac software downloaded from the internet, Gatekeeper checks whether the software was signed with a valid Developer ID certificate. If not, then Gatekeeper refuses to run the software. Over the years, Gatekeeper has become more strict…
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Software engineering topics I changed my mind on
At some point, I realized I would've argued the exact opposite position on a lot of topics just a few years ago.
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Dotfile madness
My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn't belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can't place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear…
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How to C in 2016
This is a draft I wrote in early 2015 and never got around to publishing. Here’s the mostly unpolished version because it wasn’t doing anybody any good sitting in my drafts folder. The simplest change was updating year 2015 to 2016 at publication time.
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Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…
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Chatto is now open source
The snappiest chat application you've ever used is now available for self-hosting.
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So you've installed `fzf` – now what?
Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can …
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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
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Attention is all you have
The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments.Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks.A...
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Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
Reviewing the JIT in Python 3.13
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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming
Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types.
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Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
I recently noticed that Google Docs has a pretty full-featured scripting system called Apps Script . It lets you write JavaScript to do some pretty useful things:
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Modules, not microservices
Dissecting why everybody keeps talking about microservices.
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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic…
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Libghostty 1.0
libghostty-vt 1.0 is here. libghostty is a portable, high-performance C library for terminal emulation, extracted directly from the core of Ghostty. The 1.0 release means both the library itself and the C ABI are now stable.
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QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time
Introducing QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression. All single-threaded, no SIMD. It's also stupidly simple .
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Developers’ side projects
If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?
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Mr TIFF
For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use. I have spent 10,000+ hours to create an accurate record of their work but I'm not complaining. The
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An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.