Topics /
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.
Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…
Let me preface this with an apology: this is a technology love story, and as such, it’s long, rambling, sentimental and personal. Also befitting a love story, it has a When Harry Met Sally feel to it, in that its origins are inauspicious…
I've used Linux containers directly and indirectly for years, but I wanted to become more familiar with them. So I wrote some code. This used to be 500 lines of code, I swear, but I've revised it some since publishing; I've ended up with about 70 lines more.
Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents . Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. Tangle is super-simple and easy to learn.
For people who've worked through Mastery with SQL , a common question I get is "What's next?" If you completed the course and all 150+ exercises, at this point you'll have a very strong grasp of SQL and should be comfortable writing all sorts of complex queries. However, there's more to working with databases…
It is a lazy Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps you were idly browsing your favorite news aggregator, or visiting The Orange Website to wade through murky startup groupthink in search of interesting links.
Over the last few years, the software development community’s love affair with the popular open-source relational database has reached a…
The VP of Engineering at Cognition, the applied AI lab behind Devin. Building the future of software engineering with AI.
I've been very surprised and delighted over a number of years now by Microsoft's strong efforts in open source. I understand the skeptics, I was on Slashdot when they tried to sue Linux out of existence and I think only time will tell. I figure MS contributing is better than them hunting Linux distributions for sport…
Bored of algorithms? Here are my recommendations that are exciting, understandable, and sometimes even useful!
This may be overkill, but it works on my machine
Or: Why do I always do things the hard way?
LLVM is a godsend of a research tool. Here are some detailed notes on what LLVM is, why you would want to use it for research, and how to get started as a compiler hacker.
No matter what language you program in or what applications you use: everything you do with a computer today is powered at some level by a piece of C/C++ code.
Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on software performance • Notes on…
It's time to stop drawing user interfaces with punctuation characters. Native UI is a completely solved problem.
This article is about a bit of surprising behavior I recently discovered using Python's regex module (re) while developing SBOM tooling for CPython. Folks who've worked with regular expressions be...
Professor Sussman's reading recommendations
The current state of app bloat.
I've been using Bash functions quite liberally over the past couple years, but last week I discovered that they can be much better than I thought. In this post, I'll explain how I thought they worked, why I was wrong, and how that makes them better.Function syntax
My current "investment thesis" is that what we call web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers. When it comes to eking performance out of hand-authored JavaScript and accompanying runtime libraries, we've reached the point of diminishing returns.
When my son was born last April, I had ambitious learning plans for the upcoming 5w paternity leave. As you can imagine, with two kids, life quickly verified this plan 🙃. I did eventually start some projects. One of the goals (sounding rebellious in the current AI hype cycle) was to learn and use neovim for coding. As…
We helped frontline to fight against covid-19 by creating a Realtime Patient Monitoring system. In this blog post you can find out how we did it using go and vuejs
Magic Mouse hack with USB-C charger
I have kept myself busy with the Game Engine Black Books and I have plenty of news. Most importantly, they have been revised. The DOOM book is now in version 1.1 while the WOLF3D book is entering v2.1. And there is more.
Evals, RAG, fine-tuning, caching, guardrails, defensive UX, and collecting user feedback.
The internet is full of dogmatic commandments for choosing and using keys in relational databases. At times it verges on a holy war: should you use natural or artificial keys? Auto-incrementing integers, UUIDs?
