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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.
Towards the end of my mid-2019 job search, I was down to joining the Google Go team or Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph ultimately won due to cultural factors - the most important of which was the ability to build 100% in the open . All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were…
How do you create a Python package? How do you set up automated testing and code coverage? How do you publish the package? That's what this article...
Overall, Rust is pretty good for performance. Write the most simple, naive stuff, and it will usually run within a factor of two from optimized C/C++ code, without any further performance work on the code. With some investment into optimizations, matching or exceeding C’s speed should be possible in most cases…
In Dec 2022 I watched Richard Stallman's talk on the EmacsConf , it was titled "What I'd like to see in Emacs". One of the interesting points Mr. Stallman pointed out in this talk was "memorable names", "I think every …
I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they…
AI-assisted coding has become the norm and with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, we are increasingly letting models touch our code. If you have used any of these tools in the past year, you have probably experienced something like this: you ask the model to fix a simple bug (perhaps a single…
ETA, 2022-05-19: I'm happy this blog post has gathered a fair bit of interest. However, this post is as much effort as I'm prepared to put into the topic. I think it would be a good idea to write an essay, article, or even a book, on how syntax of the Unix command line has varied over the years, and in different…
When seeing the phrase “dynamic programming” in an algorithms class or leetcode study guide, the first question people ask is “what does ‘dynamic’ mean in this context?”.
Seeing a program you wrote running directly on the bare metal is deeply satisfying to anyone who enjoys writing software. And it turns out that creating such a program from scratch is easier than it sounds. The hardest part is figuring out where to start. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to write, build and run the…
Etymology is fun!
If you were like me in college, you first learned about the C programming language in an introductory computer science course. Then, perhaps you took a really hard course in operating systems. Then, y
Agentic coding tools are dramatically reducing software development costs. Here's why 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. I&…
I'm certainly not a world-class expert, but I have put my 10,000 hours of deliberate practice into programming. Here are 31 of my reflections on programming.
Lessons I learned while building my own coding agent from scratch.
Fourier transforms are a tool used in a whole bunch of different things. This is a explanation of what a Fourier transform does, and some different ways it can be useful.
Why AI can make software development faster without replacing the judgment and understanding needed to build consistently good software.
a short post
I saw this question on the Software Engineering Stack Exchange: What are the barriers that prevent widespread adoption of formal methods? The question was closed as opinion-based, and most of the answers were things like “its too expensive!!!” or “website isn’t airplane!!!” These are sorta kinda true but don’t explain…
What is the average size of JavaScript code downloaded per website? Fuck around and find out!
Jonathan Palardy's blog about technology
Inspired by Jan Stette's "Things I Believe" post, I decided to write down some of the more contentious beliefs I have about software engineering. I've selected some of my more extreme opinions here, so I expect reasonable people to disagree with me. That's ok.
The way I was taught x86 assembly at the university had been completely outdated for many years by the time I had my first class. It was around 2008 or 2009, and 64-bit processors had already started becoming a thing even in my neck of the woods. Meanwhile, we were doing DOS, real-mode, memory segmentation and all the…
Today we celebrate the fact that it is exactly 17 years since the first public release of curl. I have always been the lead developer and maintainer of the project. When I released that first version in the spring of 1998, we had only a handful of users and a handful of contributors. curl was … Continue reading curl…
Say we have some things, and we want to be able to store and look them up in order. We could just put them in a big sorted array:
