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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,529 posts.
It took three years and 200,000 words more than I expected, but my second book, Crafting Interpreters , is complete. I finished the third draft of the last chapter today, marking the last of around 1,400 days of continuous writing.
LLMs make it easier to write code, but understanding, reviewing, and maintaining it still takes time, trust, and good judgment.
A place to play around with technology and make it easy and fun
With ZWJ (Zero Width Joiner) sequences you could in theory encode an unlimited amount of data in a single emoji.
The fundamental problems a database engineer thinks about in the shower
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us
Update for future readers: Are you looking for a way to undo something with Git? The git undo command won’t help with your current issue (it needs to be inst...
Introduction Postgres queue tech is a thing of beauty, but far from mainstream. Its relative obscurity is partially attributable to the cargo cult of “scale”. The scalability cult has decreed that there are several queue technologies with greater “scalability” than Postgres, and for that reason alone, Postgres isn’t…
Awk is a tiny programming language and a command line tool. It's particularly appropriate for log parsing on servers, mostly because Awk will operate on files, usually structured in lines of human-readable text.
A list of new(ish) command line tools
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
Programming with dates, times, and timezones is hard. But here's some help.
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
Ever since I opened up my Direct Messages and invited everyone to ask me computer graphics related questions on Twitter , I am very often asked the question "How can I get started with graphics programming?". Since I am getting tired of answering this same question over and over again, I will in this post compile a…
How we designed xkcd's massive rube goldberg machine game in 3 weeks.
Home page and blog of David Zhang (@crispgm), a minimalist programmer, photographer, and lifehacker.
Update: This post represents my views before I joined the Microsoft Edge team, and before I got involved with browsers or web standards in general. I leave it…
We can admit our knowledge gaps without devaluing our expertise.
Hugo Daniel's site about ideas and software experimentations
In the two years since I’ve posted I want off Mr Golang’s Wild Ride, it’s made the rounds time and time again, on Reddit, on Lobste.rs, on HackerNews, and elsewhere. And every time, it elicits the ...
You can use emoji (and other graphical unicode characters) in URLs. And wow is it great. But no one seems to do it. Why? Perhaps emoji are too exotic for normie web platforms to handle? Or maybe they are avoided for fear of angering the SEO gods?
I build shaders, renderers, games, and other stuff that's fun to stare at.
In November of 2024 I wrote a blog post titled "Is Python Really That Slow?", in which I tested several versions of Python and noted the steady progress the language has been making in terms of…
We are hearing a lot about what happened at PyCon 2013, but most of what is being passed around tells only a tiny part of what really happened. Here’s how PyCon went for me this year: The Ed…
Maestro is a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust
