Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 994 posts.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
A playbook for ethical engineering on the web.
While exploring D recently, I remembered a game I played while at university 15 years ago. For a long time, I couldn’t remember the name at all, only that it was from a Japanese developer. After some search wrangling, I finally managed to find the name of the game: Torus Trooper!
We use software for our everyday needs because we want to get something done. We have goals to achieve and things to do.
An API is a user interface for programmers, and is no different from a graphical user interface, command-line user interface, or any other interface a human is expected to work with. Turns out programmers are people – who would have thought?
Play games made by Sheepolution
Did you know there’s an algebraic structure for functions? That may not surprise you at all. But it surprised me when I first found out about it. I knew we used functions to build algebraic structures. It never occurred to me that functions themselves might have an algebraic structure. The structure is fascinating…
Software Development For People That Help People.
There’s something really quite subtle about how the nproc utility from GNU coreutils works. If you look at the man page, it’s even the very first sentence: Print the number of processin…
Lately, I’ve been playing around with inventing a visual writing system for lambda calculus.
Sofware dysfunction is more often motivated by worry than it is by a lack of technical skill
Simplex Sigillum Veri
The primary purpose of software testing is to detect any potential defects in a program before it reaches its intended consumers. This is typically achieved by establishing functional requirements which define supported user interactions as well as…
You visit a seemingly simple website with little or no interactivity, yet somehow it sends you 2 MB of JavaScript to digest. You're half way down the article that you're reading and suddenly: client-side rendering kicks in, resets everything. You try to find your way back but the page is now janking around. Your…
Using graph theory and Ryanair route data to find cheap multi-city flight loops through Europe.
How to ship your apps on Debian and derivatives.
A common situation in asyncio Python programs is asynchronous initialization. Some resource must be initialized exactly once before it can be used, but the initialization itself is asynchronous — such as an asyncpg database. Let’s talk about a couple of solutions.
Integers in programming languages have a valid range but arithmetic operations can result in values that exceed such ranges. For example, adding two large integers can result in an integer that cannot be represented in the integer type. We often refer to such error conditions as overflows. In a programming languages…
It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!
Modern best practices for unit tests and integration tests in Java and in general
What a commit history of version-controlled research papers could look like?
Initially I wanted to write articles on those two topics separately (mocking time and testing event loops), but during the process I realized that the things I want to talk about are too interrelated: when I need to mock time, it's usually to test some event loop with it, and when I test event loops, typically mocked…
In this post, we implement a garbage collector that frees memory no longer used by the executables our compiler creates.
Last week, I revisited Andrew Kensler's business card raytracer to make it run as fast as possible [1] . It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot in the process. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to revisit Andrew's follow up, the postcard sized pathtracer [2] . I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of that code…
What happens when we get or set an attribute of a Python object? This question is not as simple as it may seem at first. It is true that any...
Pathfinding is one of these topics that usualy baffles game developers. The A* algorithm in particular is poorly understood, and the general belief seems to be that it’s arcane magic.
