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The silent death of good code
I’ve been passionate about writing “Good Code™” since before I started my career, beginning way back when I was still a kid in middle school.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
10712
Go 1.21 will (probably) download newer toolchains on demand by default
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…
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Should you split that file?
Splitting code into files can scatter related logic. Jimmy Koppel on cognitive load, design reconstruction, and a third way to organize code.
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The Second Golden Age of Emacs
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. – Randall Jarrell
10715
Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop
Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainf*ck code results in an infinite loop, akin amost to a DDoS attack:
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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
10717
Software Design Principles I Learned the Hard Way
If there’s two sources of truth, one is probably wrong. And yes, please repeat yourself.
10718
Building a Raspberry Pi GPS Speedometer
Back in April of last year, the speedometer failed in my ‘94 Explorer. Rather than hunting down a replacement cable and tearing apart the dash just to restore an old analog needle, I opted to build a digital replacement using a Raspberry Pi and GPS.
10719
Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
LedgerStore became a case study for DynamoDB, and system design publications keep praising it to this day. But the design was abandoned 3 years after it went live.
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Why I write recursive descent parsers, despite their issues (2020)
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…
10722
Systemd: Enable indefinite service restarts
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
10723
Composition shouldn't be this hard
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.
10724
Building Container Images with Nix
Dockerfiles are de facto standard for creating container images. In this article I highlight some issues with this approach and I propose building container images with Nix.
10725
I tested 10 model/harness combinations on the same Three.js task
I've been testing a simple prompt with different model and harness combinations to work out which one produces best results. I do this in /goal mode.
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Big Programming, Small Programming – Glow, the language
Programming is complicated. Different programs have different abstraction levels, domains, platforms, longevity, team sizes, etc ad infinitum. There …
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Fuzz me wrong – How QuickCheck destroyed my favourite theory
Quite a while back I wrote a larger article on the algebraic foundation of software patterns which also covered the MapReduce algorithm .
10734
Local First Htmx
Overview Part 2 is now ready There is a common refrain on the internet that things have gotten worse and are continuing to get worse. There is a proliferation of horrible jumpy loading ads on every website, every search engine throws a crappy AI summary in front of your search result, every site/webapp seems to have…
10735
Visual programming should start in the debugger
Just like CAD didn't make everyone an industrial designer, visual programming isn't going to make everyone a programmer. Whether textual or visual, there'd still be a lot of underlying concepts (and how they are composed) to learn. But still, I think it's underexplored. Most visual programming paradigms focus on…
10736
Version Control for Structure Editing
That’s the headline for my latest project (with Tomas Petricek), presented at HATRA. [paper] [recorded talk] With this work I am finally confronting the demon cursing my work: version control. If w…
10737
Obscure C++ Features
This page is a collection of obscure C++ features, gathered over the years as I've explored different corners of the language. C++ is very big and I'm always learning more about it. Hopefully you'll learn something from this page even if you already know C++ pretty well. The features below are roughly ordered from…
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What’s New In Emacs 24.4
Discover what's new in Emacs 24.4 as I annotate most of the changes made to the new Emacs version.
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Implementing a Struct of Arrays
My CppCon 2025 talk, Practical Reflection, is now online, and goes over this example in more detail and more digressions. Check it out!