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Why I wrote the BEAM book
The story behind writing The BEAM Book-ten years, three publishers, and an open‑source sprint.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
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Reinvent the Wheel
One of the most harmful pieces of advice is to …
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A guide to local coding models
What you need to know about local model tooling and the steps for setting one up yourself
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Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter
A deep dive into the performance of Python 3.14's tail-call interpreter: How the performance results were confounded by an LLVM regression, the surprising complexity of compiling interpreter loops, and some reflections on performance work, software engineering, and optimizing compilers.
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How to write blog posts that developers read
Software bloggers can make the same mistakes for years that prevent readers from discovering their writing. I know because I'm one of them. Over time, I've learned techniques that help some blog posts succeed and the pitfalls that cause others to languish in obscurity.
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XOR
Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved.
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Bad Apple but it's 6,500 regexes that I search for in Vim
There's no reason I should exit vim just to watch a video
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When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
Last month I have been on a multi-day hike with my dad. Each of us took many pictures, and when we came back we put them all in a shared folder. We both have Android phones, and the naming scheme used for our pictures was the same: IMG_YYYYMMDD_HHmmss followed maybe by some other numbers and then a .jpg . Here YYYY…
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Succinct data structures
An overview of a class of data structures I didn't know about!
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My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
I wrote about the new GLM-4.5 model family yesterday—new open weight (MIT licensed) models from Z.ai in China which their benchmarks claim score highly in coding even against models such …
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AI Blindspots – Blindspots in LLMs I've noticed while AI coding
Blindspots in LLMs I’ve noticed while AI coding. Sonnet family emphasis. Maybe I will eventually suggest Cursor rules for these problems.
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Why xor eax, eax?
Why do compilers love xor-ing registers so much?
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Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
Thoughts, tools, and libraries I use to make games
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The blissful Zen of a good side project
One of life's greatest simple pleasures is creating something just for yourself.
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A minimax chess engine in regular expressions
I wrote a (list of) regular expressions that will play a (not very good) chess game by running a 2-ply minimax search.
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How to draw an outline in a video game
🖍️ Explaining multiple techniques for rendering outlines and highlights for real-time applications. This includes vertex object-space as well as screen-space methods. This can be used to render outlines in Unity or Unreal. Outlines can be used for gameplay reasons or aesthetics.
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The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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How I use my terminal
i have gone a little above and beyond trying to get all the features of VSCode
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Build your own database
A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch.
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LLM from scratch, part 28 – training a base model from scratch on an RTX 3090
I felt like it should be possible to train a GPT-2 small level model on my own hardware using modern tools and open datasets from scratch. It was!
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20 years working on the same software product
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has c…
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Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. An…
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I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst
I recently submitted my PhD thesis , and while waiting for the physical copies to get printed I thought I’d write about something you (hopefully) wouldn’t notice when reading it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what didn’t.
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Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)
The entire book revolves around the "nine rules." After the typical introduction and list of the rules, there's one chapter for each rule. Each of these chapters describes the rule, explains why it's a rule, and includes several "sub-rules" that explain how to apply the rule. Most importantly, there are lots of "war…
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Reservoir Sampling
Choosing fairly when you don't know how many you're choosing from.
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Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills
Live coding measure stress, not coding skills
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Unexpected productivity boost of Rust
Rust is known for having a steep learning curve, but in this post we will be looking at another curve, the one showing developer productivity in relation to the project size.