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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,020 posts.
This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the command-line the ability to get Datasette up and …
The conventional view of Software Testing The hardware and software worlds may seem poles apart, and in many ways, they indeed are. But there’s a wealth of knowledge that each can learn from the ot…
A deep-dive technical overview of how you can write CPython extensions in assembly (with a bonus tutorial on assembly programming)
Dmitry Kudryavtsev is a software engineer with more than a decade of experience in the industry, and a tech entrepreneur creating sustainable online business.
The macro Ecto Query dynamic/2 allows you to build query fragments and interpolate them into one large query. We get easy-to-manage query building in an accessible way. It allows you to control the parameters from the user and transparently create filtering of data stored in the database.
I have to admit, my research blog posts are getting longer and longer. From one side I find it genuinely encouraging, because if one gets so much information just by scratching the topic, imagine what’s hidden beneath the surface! One university professor once said “what could be interesting in databases?”, and it…
The conflict between subclassing and composition is as old as object-oriented programming. The latest crop of languages like Go or Rust prove that you don’t need subclassing to successfully write code. But what’s a pragmatic approach to subclassing in Python, specifically?
This post is the last in a three-part series about Cranelift . In the first post , I covered overall context and the instruction-selection problem; in the second post , I took a deep dive into compiler performance via careful algorithmic design.
A workaround to get nice stack traces for errors in Go.
How types might be the missed part of the future of code
I've recently become active again on twtxt.net , the platform that puts the "social" in "anti-social social media". There is a lot of intelligent discussion to be had there, and for the past couple days a discussion has been going on about technology buzzwords and, later, unnecessary complexity on websites. I was…
This is a follow-up to Error handling in Rust from a couple of days ago. The moment we want to use error propagation for different error types, we have to rely on trait objects with Box<dyn Error>, which means we defer a lot of information from compile-time to runtime, for the sake of convenient error handling.
WebAssembly and WASI show great promise for the future of computing outside the browser, and the WebAssembly component model aims to improve the portability, cross-language, and composition story for Wasm. This article explains the goals of the component model, and showcases how to use tooling from the Bytecode…
Technical blog of Ryan Jerue
Version 0.9 of the Zig programming language is planned to release in about a week. One of the major changes coming in this release is a restructuring of how allocators work, which has been termed Allocgate . This is a breaking change to the Allocator API provided by the standard library, so pretty much any code that…
Offset pagination gets a bad rap because it’s backend inefficient, but it’s actually a nice feature from a consumer’s perspective. How to bring those advantages to cursor-based APIs.
This is an introductory article about shell injection, a security vulnerability allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the user's machine. This is a well-studied problem, and there are simple and efficient solutions to it. It's relatively easy to design library API in such a way as to shield the application…
Updated in 2026: glibc 2.43 added experimental support for building with Clang. In September 2021, I wrote "So, dear glibc, will you be happy with my sending Clang patches?" in Build glibc with LLD 13. We have come to a turning point. In Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, at the glibc Birds of a Feather session, I asked…
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
This post explains the project's motivation from several perspectives. Unix shell is an old and successful technology, so there are many ways of looking at it.
What is threaded code? What is it good for? What are the differences between the various threading techniques? How do I implement threaded code portably? How fast are various threading techniques?
Explaining the difference between Mock Objects and Stubs (together with other forms of Test Double). Also the difference between classical and mockist styles of unit testing.
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
This paper appears in Advances in Exception Handling Techniques , edited by A. Romanovsky, C. Dony, J.L. Knudsen, and A. Tripathi. This book, published in 2001, is part of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2022 , published by Springer .
A review of Javascript performance. Part 1 - Techempower Rankings.
The Modus themes for Emacs meet the highest accessibility standard for colour contrast. This is their official manual.
There are not a lot of very strong empirical results in the field of programming languages . This is probably because there’s a huge amount of variables to control for, and most of the subjects available to researchers are CS undergraduates. However, I have recently found a result replicated across numerous codebases…
