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Simulating water over terrain
If you don't want a long an boring introduction, skip directly to the virtual pipes method description . I will get a little bit sad if you do this, though x)
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,532 posts.
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Cut the cutesy errors
If your app has just ruined my day, I need help, not humour.
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I am happier writing code by hand
I felt the familiar feeling of depression and lethargy creep in while my eyes darted from watching claude-code work and my phone. “What’s the point of it all?” I thought, LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll? This was the third time I gave claude-code…
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JavaScript libraries should be written in TypeScript
Open Source Freelancer
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I love software rendering
Sharp pixels, gritty colour banding, and DOS games running at resolutions their own era couldn’t manage. Why I still prefer the software renderer, and why it needs a fast PC.
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Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day—the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant …
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Things Every Hacker Once Knew (2017)
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
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Seven books I keep close because I love them
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
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My Logging Best Practices (2020)
If you are a backend developer like me, logging is the window to your application. Unlike in the frontend, there’s not much to see except of your log messages. Here are some of my personal guidelines I use when I write logs.
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Beautiful branchless binary search
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D”. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s i…
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How to Level Up as a Developer
How does a good developer become a great developer?
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Reading OpenBSD source code daily
I made a new years resolution to read at least one C source file from OpenBSD daily.The goal was to both get better at C and to contribute more to the base s...
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The “No Code” Delusion
Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this, and I think some of the “no code” tools are…
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Zig's New Async I/O
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
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Using GPT-3 to explain how code works
One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast …
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Let's Code a TCP/IP Stack: TCP Retransmission
At this point we have a TCP/IP stack that is able to communicate to other hosts in the Internet. The implementation so far has been fairly straight-forward, but missing a major feature: Reliability. Namely, our TCP does not guarantee the integrity of the data stream it presents to applications. Even establishing the…
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Writing code is cheap now
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
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OCaml as my primary language
A detailed explanation of why I chose OCaml as the ‘default’ programming language for every project.
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Text editing hates you too (2019)
Alexis Beingessner's Text Rendering Hates You , published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.
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It's Playtime - Light Table Playground released
I’m happy to announce the official release of the Light Table Playground ! You can find instructions for getting it here: http://app.kodowa.com/playground
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My approach to building large technical projects (2023)
Whether it's building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.
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Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025
Announcing AoCO 2025 - daily December posts about compiler optimisations
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Jujutsu for busy devs
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Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
Developing Opinions - A blog by Jimmy Breck-McKye