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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,136 posts.
tl;dr annotated AHK scripts here. Anybody who’s spent time with me knows how much I love AutoHotKey, the flat-out best Windows automation tool in the world. Anybody’s who’s tried to use AutoHotKey knows how intimidating it can be. So to help with that, I’m sharing (almost) all of my scripts along with extensive…
Slides and videos explaining a functional approach to error handling
After needing to do a deep dive on the venv module (which I will explain later in this blog post as to why), I thought I would explain how virtual environments work to help demystify them. Why do virtual environments exist? Back in my the day, there was no concept
I am using C for a professional project. I believe in memory safety. Yes, I'm a hypocrite, but please, let me explain.
On uniform vs. specific syntax.
And then telling it to not generate those images!
Seriously, I don't. I'd prefer SQL.
This post is about why we need a coroutine package for Go, and what it would look like. But first, what are coroutines?
Elixir is the thing I do most of my public writing and speaking about. It is my default programming language for the last 5-6 years. It suits my brain. Performs well for the kind of work I typically do. And using it I have experienced very few drawbacks. Rather than writing yet another post trying to widely summarize…
Why and how we continuously invested the team bandwidth to pay back tech debt and what were the results?
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the…
Introduction Recently, I watched a video by YouTuber ThePrimeTime which details a dev’s frustrations with business culture. Prime is an ex-entrepreneur who currently works in software development at Netflix. His views in this video have been criticised for being jaded by FAANG business cultures he has worked in. I…
Proper support for sum types or tagged unions have become table stakes for systems programming languages. However, they can incur a lot of memory fragmentation that's not trivial to avoid without good support for metaprogramming. This post goes into Zig's powerful comptime feature, and how it allows some radical…
This work by Keith Waclena is copyright 2026 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
[…] Embedded in Academia : Why Take a Compiler Course? – Seconded, or whatever – my compiler course was briefer than I'd have liked but many of my peers didn't take it and I spent ages explaining what I thought where simple concepts to them when working on group projects and the like. […]
(New to this series? Consider starting from part 1) At the end of the last post, we started to get some interesting functionality with the ability to resolve addresses to names in a module. This was the last functionality missing before we could implement breakpoints! This part adds the ability for DbgRs to set…
Gautham's Blog
A visual, interactive introduction to hash functions.
Well that blew up. It was supposed to be just a silly off-the-cuff comment about how some bugs are very tedious to bisect. To answer a few questions people had, here’s what actually happened.…
We often romanticize the notion of programming, presenting it as an abstract form of art, a science, or even a form of magic. The truth, however, is much mor...
For the past few years I’ve been the most senior developer on my teams in Atlassian, in both position (Principal Engineer) and time (almost 9 years ) - this means I usually take on the responsibility of managing our software architecture.
An exciting proposal is expected to land in Go 1.22 - enhancing the pattern-matching capabilities of the default HTTP serving multiplexer in the net/http package.
I’m excited to share a 3 state, 3 symbol Turing Machine that cannot be proven to halt or not (when starting on a blank tape) without solving a Collatz-like problem. Therefore, solving the \(BB(3, 3)\) problem is at least as hard as solving this Collatz-like problem, a class of problem for which Paul Erdős famously…
The most important coding habits are those that enable us to enjoy this craft for years to come. Here are tips for programming without pain.
When people say “debuggers are useless and using logging and unit-tests is much better,” I suspect many of them think that debuggers can only put breakpoints on certain lines, step-step-step through the code, and check variable values. While any reasonable debugger can indeed do all of that, it’s only the tip of the…
Instagram's guiding principles and tech stack explained simply
Which is better for code reviews, a unified diff or a split diff?
I typically start new front-end prototypes with a single HTML file that I view using a file:// URL. I enjoy this practice of incrementally growing my projects, so I’ll keep working in that single file for as long as I can. Once it becomes unwieldy, I’ll split out the CSS and JavaScript into dedicated files. Then when…
I recently came up with a "clever" idea to eliminate one jump from an inner loop, and was surprised to find that it slowed things down. Allow me to explain my terrible error, so that you don't fall victim in the future.
