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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 808 posts.

2018
158

Post-REST

More or less all the big APIs are RESTful these days. Yeah, you can quibble about what “REST” means (and I will, a bit) but the assertion is broadly true. Is it going to stay that way forever? Seems unlikely. So, what’s next?

161

Unix Syscalls

On UNIX-like operating systems, userland processes invoke kernel procedures using the "syscall" feature. Each syscall is identified by a "syscall number" and has a short list of parameters, which both can vary between operating systems, hardware platforms, and configuration options.

164

Go hits the concurrency nail on the head

More than thirteen years have passed since Herb Sutter declared that the free lunch is over and concurrency is upon us , and yet it's hard to claim that most mainstream languages have made a strong shift towards concurrent modes of programming. We have to admit that concurrency is just hard , and the struggles of some…

168

Rules of optimization

Rules of optimization: 1) Design for performance from day 1 2) Profile often 3) Be vigilant on performance regressions 4) Understand the data 5) Understand the HW 6) Help the compiler 7) Verify your assumptions Performance is everyone's responsibility https://t.co/CwwJffnHGz

174

JS things I didn’t know existed

I was reading through the MDN docs the other day and found these JS features and APIs I never knew existed. So here is a short list of those things, useful or not - learning JS seemingly never ends. Label Statements [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/

176

Pipenv: promises a lot, delivers very little

Pipenv is a Python packaging tool that does one thing reasonably well — application dependency management. However, it is also plagued by issues, limitations and a break-neck development process. In the past, Pipenv’s promotional material was highly misleading as to its purpose and backers.

179

C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines

In this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth. I’ve found technical manuals and videos for this article to help bring each computer to life.

180

Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C

A pointer references a location in memory and dereferencing a pointer refers to the lookup of the value of the memory location the pointer references. The value of a pointer is a memory address. The C standard does not define the representation of a memory address. This is crucial since not every architecture makes…