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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,543 posts.
This is a story about Imagebin. Imagebin is the longest-lived software project that I still maintain. I'm the only user. I use it to host images, mainly to include in my blog, sometimes for sharing in other places. Imagebin's oldest changelog entry is dated May 2010, but I know it had already existed for about a year…
Summary In this post I’ll go into detail about how, during my contracting work for Shimmer Industries (a company founded by Eskil Steenberg which is focused on developing a real-time lighting designing software), I worked on a piece of software which enabled us to use the MacOS and iOS APIs using a custom C API…
One of the things I like to do is compare how different languages solve the same problem — especially when they end up having very different approaches. It’s always educational. In this case, a bunch of us have been working hard on trying to get reflection — a really transformative language feature — into C++26…
If this isn’t a Zawinski quote, it should be. I have avoided the JVM my entire life. I am presently confronted with problems which fit in the JVM; JVM libraries, concurrency, giant data: all …
I’m often surprised how long software can keep trying to use compatibility features ages after their best-by date. Now that GCC 4.8 builds on Tige...
It's not very obvious how to optimize react applications that use Redux. But it's actually fairly straightforward. Here's a short guide, along with a few examples.
“A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.” – Doug Linder
This is a post about performance. Most of the time when worrying about the performance of a piece of code the overwhelming advice should be (with apologies to Brendan Gregg) don’t worry about it, yet. However there is one area where I counsel developers to think about the performance implications of a design, and that…
A long time ago, I wrote a memoization library for Ruby. It was not easy, but I learned a great deal in the process. In this article, I am share these learnings and showing you how deep the memoization rabbit hole goes.
In this post I will unfold my understanding of what makes a tech team competent in 4 levels with 6 main criteria and 25 sub criteria.
I think that all other considerations are of the extrinsic real-world kind – domain modeling, usability, schedules, platforms, etc. I also think that I can show how any "good" programming practice is mainly aimed at minimizing redundancy, dependencies, or both. I even think that you can tell a "good" programmer from a…
Pivotal ends sponsorship for Groovy & Grails; these popular JVM projects now seek new funding and partners to continue their vital development.
Over the decades I’ve been using the shell, there are thousands of reusable patterns I’ve picked up from looking over others’ shoulders and googling.
My post on pointers provoked a lot of debate about maps and pass by reference semantics. This post is a response to those debates.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Some time ago, I was doing a web application penetration test, and noticed that the authentication tokens were UUIDs. This I knew was risky, and in fact if you read the UUID rfc, section 6 of it wa…
Take a walk with Stephen Wolfram through the topics in his new book that introduces non-programmers to the Wolfram Language and computational thinking.
This week I built datasette-ripgrep—a web application for running regular expression searches against source code, built on top of the amazing ripgrep command-line tool. datasette-ripgrep demo I’ve deployed a demo …
API versioning is a really difficult topic, and sometimes seen as a merely religious debate. It’s done differently at different companies, and different teams within different companies often vary. Some folks move from approach A to approach B, and when approach B solves their specific issues they act like
Learn the meaning behind mathematical symbols used in Machine Learning using your knowledge of Python.
Jim is a great chef. He's too modest to say that about himself, but he's worked either as head chef or assistant head chef at a number of re...
Endbot is a complete audio-visual demo that fits in exactly 256 bytes . It runs under DOS (via DosBox-X) and renders in real-time: a robot sprite with progressive bullet damage, a growing explosion, a scrolling checkerboard landscape, and a MIDI soundtrack - all from a single tiny .com file.
"Software is hard," reads the quote from Donald Knuth that opens Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code . The 400 pages that follow examine why: Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis? Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both? Why can't we ship code without bugs? Why, everyone asks…
In this post, I’ll iteratively optimize an implementation of matrix multiplication written in CUDA.My goal is not to build a cuBLAS replacement, but to deepl...
As part of my work at Anthropic, I open sourced two Rust crates that fill a gap in the RPC ecosystem: buffa, a pure-Rust Protocol Buffers…
In this, I describe why Erlang is different from most other language runtimes. I also describe why it often forgoes throughput for lower la...
