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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,260 posts.
n.b. This is a written version of a dialogue from a YouTube video: 2 Language Creators vs 2 Idiots | The StandupPackage managers (for programming languages) are evil.11 The term “evil” is being used partially hyperbolic to make a point.To start, I need to make a few distinctions between concepts a lot of programmers…
One year ago, I started programming a puzzle game from scratch in Zig. While it’s too early to announce the game (more on this later in the year), I want to share some of the insights I’ve gained about gamedev in Zig so far.
Three years ago, I wrote a post about shipping ESM & CJS in a single package , advocating for dual CJS/ESM formats to ease user migration and trying to make the best of both worlds. Back then, I didn’t fully agree with aggressively shipping ESM-only , as I considered the ecosystem wasn’t ready, especially since the…
Json parsing in C using function pointers attached to a struct
When we first set up the llm such that it could play text adventures , we noted that none of the models we tried to use with it were any good at it. We dreamed of a way to compare them, but all I could think of was setting a goal far into the game and seeing how long it takes them to get there. I just realised there’s…
Both GCC and Clang support the -fsanitize=undefined flag which instruments the generated code to detect places where the program wanders into parts of the C language specification which are either undefined or implementation defined. Many of these are also common programming errors. It would be great if there were…
My little corner of the web for sharing wherever my interests take me.
The lone lisp delimited continuations implementation journey.
Writing Super-Fast Matrix Multiplication with HIP, RGP, and ISA
Indentation styles are a hot topic in every language. So let's see how Lisps do indentation! Uuuuuuugh!
Writing code is easy. Once you have a solution in mind, and have mastered the syntax of your favorite programming language, writing code is easy. Having an LLM write entire functions for you? Even eas
Every field of human activity has its unique characteristics, and programming is no exception.
I wanted to share a side project I’ve been tinkering with for a while and finally got around to shipping: Coalton Playground – basically a web-based REPL for Coalton, which is this inte…
Patterns for managing agent context.
meshoptimizer implements several geometry compression algorithms that are designed to take advantage of redundancies common in mesh data and decompress quickly - targeting many gigabytes per second in decoding throughput. One of them, index decoder, has seen a significant and unexpected variance in performance across…
As all developers, I’ve been using git since the dawn of time, since its commands were an inscrutable jumble of ill-fitting incantations, and it has remained this way until today. Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve…
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…
There is a recent video of Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions 2025 stating that in 2024 Stripe did on average 1,145 pull requests per day. Not just creating them, but actually finishing them; "fully shipped into production". All whilst having less than a minute of API unreliability for the
Coroutines are functions that pause and resume with state, allowing flexible, bidirectional control flow in PHP.
Finally sitting down to learn Rust and how to write parsers.
Custom Elements are basically Markdown for HTML
Owen's personal website and portfolio
A Modern C++ Implementation of the Apache Arrow Columnar Format
If you can ctrl-c and ctrl-v, you can build a JIT.
Back in 2021 I looked at OpenEXR lossless compression options (and I think my findings led a change of the default zip compression level , as well as change of the compression library from zlib to libdeflate . Yay blogging about things!) . Then in 2023 I looked at losslessly compressing a bunch of floating point data…
In this blog post, we walk through how to use Matrix Cores in HIP kernels, with a focus on low-precision data types such as FP16, FP8, and FP4, as well as the new family of Matrix Core instructions with exponent block scaling introduced in the AMD CDNA™4 architecture. Through code examples and illustrations, we…
Here are some of the most interesting things I learned at DjangoCon EU 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, partially written with the help of AI: link to talks
Mastering the full stack isn’t just a technical feat: it’s a human challenge, and no, you can’t git clone your way out of it.
