Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
I want to start with that Qt is still IMHO the best way to develop C++ apps. This post is not supposed to be a rant. This is for the decision maker at Qt. If you have any question about Qt feel free to join our /r/QtFramework subreddit! The Qt developers are wonderful to work with, and every new Qt version makes it…
(This post is now also listed on the Pickcode Blog) In 11th grade, I wrote my first program, Dingo Hopper. In the game, the player controls a png of a din...
The Dawn of Microsoft's Golden Age
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month in 1974, describing the lessons he learned leading IBM’s OS/360 project during the 1960s. As technology goes, it’s ancient. Consider the workflow for a “debugging run”:
I recently watched GOTO conferences' talk Calling Functions Across Languages by Richard Feldman. I’m afraid I have to disagree with using the term 'language' in this context. It’s a no-brainer to call Java from Kotlin or Scala or to call Java from Kotlin. Hence, in the rest, I’ll use 'stack'.
Published: 17-02-2023 20:21 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
One of the great thing about C are the many fairly mature tools in the ecosystem. The bad news however is that most educational materials don't teach them and thus many beginners (and sometimes even experienced) developers have absolutely no awareness that these tools even exists.
Earlier this year, I attended CfgMgmtCamp in Ghent and listened to Adam Jacob’s “What if Infrastructure as Code never existed” keynote. Note: I’d like to extend a huge thanks to
I know I promised to put out an article every week on a Sunday. I haven't been too good at sticking to that schedule. It's now Sunday morning at around 8:50...
Wherein Application Audio Is Routed Between Isolated Programs by Virtual Cables, and Streamer-Focused Solutions Are Observed to Have Eased Tedious Setup, While macOS and Windows Tools Such as BlackHole and VB Audio Are Catalogued.
I recently read the article Beautiful Branchless Binary Search by Malte Skarupke. In it they discuss the merits of the following snippet of C++ code implementing a binary search :
I recently wrote a small 16-bit Forth for 8086 PCs running DOS. I built the basic one-liner loop words that can trivially be built with j...
Someone mentioned cargo-bloat the other day and it reminded me that I have been wanting to measure the code size for generic functions in librsvg, and see if there are improvements to be made.
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…
Note: On the back of some feedback I’ve created a follow-up of this post where I refine the thesis. I’ve left this post as-is for the sake of comparison
The rise of agile methods (particularly XP) makes some people wonder if there's any role left for software design. I argue that this change shifts from planned to evolutionary design.
A rewrite of this blog post with many new insights and updates appeared in Jan 2026
Single ownership is one of those concepts that's both easier and more powerful than we realize.
In this post, I am going to talk about the N + 1 queries problem. While trying to solve this problem myself recently, I noticed most of the blog posts only talk about the very simple version of the problem and the proposed solutions would break down when the use cases get complex. I will try to get into more depth and…
Thoughts on building, shipping and iterating quickly
I always got fascinated by heap memory. Questions such as How heap memory is obtained from kernel? How efficiently memory is managed? Is it managed by kernel or by library or by application itself?…
This post is about two new command-line utilities: rep and ren. Both are available on GitHub.
At a fundamental level, a programmer needs to manipulate bits. Modern processors operate over data by loading in 'registers' and not individual bits. Thus a programmer must know how to manipulate the bits within a register. Generally, we can do so while programming with 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit integers. For…
Software companies come in many sizes. There are small startups, medium-sized companies, and huge enterprises. As you might expect, startups are usually lean and fast. Big companies that develop large applications move much more slowly. Those might be systems developed for many years or decades by hundreds of…
Most systems today rely on Unicode strings. However, we have two popular Unicode formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. We often need to convert from one format to the other. For example, you might have a database formatted with UTF-16, but you need to produce JSON documents using UTF-8. This conversion is often called…
This semester, I am teaching Compilers , and I'm quite happy with how I covered parsing this year. Specifically, I taught students to build a top-down LR parser and it seemed to go relatively well.
In the early to mid-90s, I ran a BBS out of my bedroom. It wasn’t very popular, but I did have a lot of time on my hands and I spent a lot of that time modding it. Initially, I wrote mods for myself, but eventually I started releasing them to other people. As a teenager, this was the first software that I wrote that…
As I tend to do, I picked a topic to write about that is much larger in scope than I could manage in a reasonable amount of time. Did I learn? Apparently...
