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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
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…
How it felt to be computing in the late aughts vs. now.
Memory-mapping a file is convenient, but it's a hazard when used with async/await concurrent code: it means a "simple" memory index does blocking IO.
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...
Here's a usability feature for the web: disable double-clicks on links and form submits. Before you think I'm a complete idiot, allow me to talk some sense into …
How (and why!) to convince the machines to write lenses for you
No one has ever written a FactoryFactoryFactory and deployed it to production, right? This article takes a look at some real Java mishaps.
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025
Master the art of efficient text navigation and editing in Vim with this comprehensive command workflow tutorial. Explore key commands and practical examples to enhance your productivity in Vim.
Someone asked me recently what I thought about XML being removed from the Twitter streaming API. Around the same time, I heard that Foursquare are also moving to a JSON-only API.
A playbook for ethical engineering on the web.
I haven’t been on r/lisp for a week or so due to being rather low on free time as we try and get an alpha of our game out of the door. When I did pop back I saw ‘5 Reasons why Lisp Games Suffer and proposed solution’ which I thought would be interesting, but what I found was bizarre and misinforming.
Three years ago, I downloaded the nascent Scala.js compiler and tried to use it on a toy project.
I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago 1 1 Well, this was true when I started drafting this article. I have since adopted robots to do much more of the actual typing of code, unless it’s a project where (a) I care about code quality, or (b) I try to learn something. : I make edits in my text editor, I…
A crit-bit tree can be used as a high-speed associative array. For example, an array mapping 54 to 1, 19 to 2, 99 to 3, 85 to 4, and 88 to 5 can be stored as a crit-bit tree containing 54=1, 19=2, 99=3, 85=4, and 88=5. The smallest string in the crit-bit tree larger than 85= is 85=4.
A tutorial how to use a monorepo architecture in frontend JavaScript and TypeScript with tools like npm/yarn/pnpm workspaces, Turborepo/NX/Lerna, Git Submodules, ...
John Doe's personal website
Type safety is the property of a programming language, ensuring its programs are well defined and creating a foundation for reasoning.
Introduction About two years ago I evaluated the performance of ~20 compilers and interpreters on sudoku solving, matrix multiplication, pattern matching and dictionary operations. Two years later,…
Concept Motivation Imagine an open world RPG where your actions affect the price of goods, the markets reacting to anything the player may do (burn down wheat fields, cost of food increases; kill the merchants, prices differentiate between cities; sell the many swords you’ve collected on your adventures, tank the…
Given a string, get a truncated string of length up to 12. The task is ambiguous, as it doesn't say anything about whether or not 12 shou...
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When I kicked off my startup HubSpot over 4 years ago June 2006 I wrote a set of articles on the topic of choosing a language/platform specific
