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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,533 posts.

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2322

Why do people still use VBA?

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…

2325

Senior engineers are living in the future

I magine for a moment that, by some quirk of the universe, you are sharing your workspace with a time traveller. Specifically, yourself from 1 year in the future. How will you react to your new co-worker? 1 [ 1 If you find this exercise difficult, try instead imagining how your past self of a year ago would react to…

2327

A modest critique of Htmx

At work, we really like the basic simple idea of Htmx. Based on using Htmx in a non-trivial user interface, across a team, we’ve found that the following cases are actually not simple and are quite complicated.

2328

A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles

In my first decade writing Makefiles, I developed the bad habit of liberally using GNU Make’s extensions. I didn’t know the line between GNU Make and the portable features guaranteed by POSIX. Usually it didn’t matter much, but it would become an annoyance when building on non-Linux systems, such as on the various…

2331

Why does gRPC insist on trailers?

gRPC comes up occasionally on the Orange Site , often with a redress of grievences in the comment section. One of the major complaints people have with gRPC is that it requires HTTP trailers. This one misstep has caused so much heartache and trouble, I think it probably is the reason gRPC failed to achieve its goal…

2332

How to Use Go Interfaces

I occasionally give free Go consults and code review on top of my daily work. As such, I tend to read a lot of other peoples’ codes. And while this is really more of a feeling *Now, you should go, really? You're a statistician by training ffs, I’ve seen an increase in what I call “Java-style” interface usage. This…