Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
In my off time (and my on time, for that matter) I've been working on this quirky thing I've called Scinamalink (sounds like 'skinamarink'). Scinamalink lets customers send Magic login links to their users with a single REST API call. If you don't know what a magic
By Devine Lu Linvega
If, like me, you learn best by studying other code here's five some open-source rails apps with something to teach. They're a great resource to study and improve your own code, or to use as the starting point for your own applications. All of these applications use Rails 2 but as they are open-source they are a great…
You find the latest version of my book at the usual place at This now contains all the material that I plan to put into it. New are “experience” parts about performance, function-like m…
This is the latest in a series of articles about writing a simple HTML rendering engine:
All the Cloud's A Staging Env, and All the Laptops Merely Clients
The ubiquitous IEEE floating-point standard defines two numbers to represent zero, the positive and the negative zeros. You also have the positive and negative infinity. If you compute the inverse of the positive zero, you get the positive infinity. If you compute the inverse of the negative zero, you get the negative…
First a round of thanks for the many people in industry and government who provided valuable links, background and insights! I could not have done this without your help! If you spot any mistakes, or have suggestions, please do contact me on bert@hubertnet.nl The EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act is admirable in its goal…
Docker Compose solves real problems in getting applications deployed. It causes problems when deploying many applications. We can do better.
I’ve been reading John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design . At one point in the book, he gives this advice about code comments: Unfortunately, many…
Apparently this horse hasn't been beaten enough.
Key path expressions as functions, callAsFunction, and more
Recently I gave an itemis internal talk about basic functional programming (FP) concepts. Towards the end I made a claim that objects and their blueprints (a.k.a. classes) have severe downsides and that it is much better to "leave data alone", which is exactly how Clojure and Haskell treat this subject.
If you're using Dapper with anonymous objects to query varchar columns, you're probably sending nvarchar(4000) parameters — causing CONVERT_IMPLICIT on every row and defeating your indexes. Here's the fix.
C++ has changed a lot in recent years. The last two revisions, C++11 and C++14, introduce so many new features that, in the words of Bjarne Stroustrup, “It feels like a new …
Let’s get straight to the point; choose an SQL database for your web application. I think I can’t make my self clearer.
Rants, experiments and experiences collected while delving into the magical world of computers.
Our industry has been infected by a dangerous meme, and it’s one that hasn’t been given its proper scrutiny. Like many memes that explode in popularity, “Worse is Better” gave a name to an underlying fragment of culture or philosophy that had been incubating for some time. I point to C++ as one of the first instances…
Principles of Data-Oriented Programming. Benefits and costs of Data-Oriented Programming. DOP vs OOP. DOP vs FP.
Well, not quite but let's start from the beginning.
This is a short introduction to Rust, intended for developers that already know another language. In the examples, Rust is compared with TypeScript, JavaScript or Java, sometimes with C++ or Kotlin.
For 2003 OSCON I proposed to give nine five-minute talks in a 45-minute slot. To avoid confusing this with the real lightning talks sessions, Nat decided to call my talk ``Nine Views of Mark Jason Dominus''. At first I didn't like that title, which sounded too much like self-promotion. But I warmed up to it after a…
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
