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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
Hello everyone, It has been quite a long time since my last blog, the last couple of months had been very busy and packed with a lot of work so I barely had much time to write blogs. Time runs so fast that the last time when I wrote a blog I was still a DevOps Engineer and now I am a Product Developer lol.
[First published: September, 2005] No one makes bad software on purpose. No programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people enough to make them cr…
In several places, the C and C++ language specifications use a curious, and fairly controversial, phrase: undefined behavior . For certain program constructs, the specification prescribes no specific behavior, instead allowing anything to happen . Such constructs are considered erroneous, and so the result depends on…
In this article I describe the DEFLATE algorithm that GZIP implements and depends on. The DEFLATE algorithm uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman codes and run-length-encoding; this article describes each in detail by walking through an example and developing source code to implement the algorithm. My aim is to…
In a [series of experiments](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/alteretal.pdf), researchers set out to discover the relationship between difficulty or
Although the techniques described below won't be very popular nowadays (after all, why bother using C if we're going to write object-oriented code?), they are still quite relevant for embedded systems and other low-level things (kernel development, etc). For example, lots of Linux Kernel subsystems use similar…
If you are writing an application in Javascript, soon you will have to worry about memory leaks. But it is difficult to even know if a memory leak exists. This handy method can help.
A "Build tool" is a catch-all term that refers to anything that is needed to get a piece of software set up, but isn't needed after that. Different programming communities have a wealth of different tools: some use stalwarts like make , some use loose collections of .sh scripts, some use XML-based tools like Maven or…
Here’s a common pattern that I see play out very often in software teams: There is a need to change the existing system behavior to accomplish new functionality. The software engineer l…
If you have ever ventured into the archives of old UNIX books and mailing lists, you will have undoubtedly come across the legend of ed. ed (pronounced /iː …
confusable-vision renders every TR39 confusable pair across 230 macOS system fonts and measures visual similarity with SSIM. 96.5% of confusables.txt is not high-risk, but 82 pairs are pixel-identical in at least one font.
You have probably never written a significant piece of correct software. Neither have I. Here's why that's not quite as bad as it sounds.
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”:
Native development on a Chromebook, with Chrome OS in Developer Mode
Some of my personal thoughts on how we design open source projects
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In this post, I’m going to cover the use of some popular open-source technologies, that when combined together provide an extremely powerful developer experience. This will be orientated towards Rails, but it should be possible to swap out View Components with something else for your stack.
I've been reading a lot of Lisp books lately, some more advanced than others. All of the introductory books I've seen cover the idea of symbolic computation, but most of them breeze past it with just a few pages about "symbols" and "quoting". For many programmers coming from non-Lisp languages these are new, foreign…
Introduction Last week, the all-knowing Mako inspired me to give zsh a shot. He started me off with a .zshrc file, and now a week later, I’ve been spreading the word to as many people as I ca…
