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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 531 posts.
How I Program Stuff
My method for writing code I care about: isolate myself for confidence and energy, eliminate every distraction, then code ruthlessly with no regrets.
A Tour of the Acme Editor
People I work with recognize my computer easily: it's the one with nothing but yellow windows and blue bars on the screen. That's the text editor acme, written by Rob Pike for Plan 9 in the early 1990s. Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface. It's difficult to explain acme without seeing it…
Use Zsh
Zsh is the new hotness. Well newer and hotter than Bash anyway, since the first version of Bash was released in June 1989, while the young and peppy …
Java 8 Lambdas
Scheduled for release in 2013 , Java 8 will include language support for lambda functions. Although the specification is still in flux, lam...
Steve Yegge and Grok
Bryan Summersett's home page.
A Git Horror Story: Repository Integrity With Signed Commits
(Note: This article was written at the end of 2012 and is out of date. I will update it at some point, but until then, please keep that in perspective.)
4 min Emacs screencast inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle
And its sibling slime-js-jack-in-browser are some conveniences that I've built around slime-js. You can find them here in my .emacs.d on github.
A Boggling Return to C
My first real programming class, back in high school, was taught in C. I found it difficult and I remember spending the whole year thinking that I really had no aptitude for programming. I think I got an OK grade in the end, but I felt like I was really struggling compared to the other students in the class. It wasn’t…
Relational shell programming
Unix is a bestiary of ad hoc databases: comma-, colon-, tab- and space-separated tables. Think of /etc/* or /var/log/* , or of columnar commands.
Building a MongoDB Clone in Postgres
I had a crazy thought. Don't all good ideas start with that phrase? Well, this one was suitably crazy: why not build my own version of MongoDB right on top of Postgres? It sounds a little far-fetched, but in all honesty it's pretty simple.
Implementing Fast Interpreters
Many modern virtual machines include either a fast interpreter or a fast baseline compiler. A baseline compiler needs extra memory and is li...
Visualizing binaries with space-filling curves
Edit: Since this post, I've created an interactive tool for binary visualisation - see it at binvis.io
Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software
Yesterday I received a new serious bug report against Mono in Debian. For those not in the know, “serious” severity is release critical, and can trigger removal of a package from the di…
Of abusive behavior in programming communities
It is traditional for each release of perl to be announced with a form letter beginning with a quote, or epigraph, chosen by the release engineer. For Perl 5.16.0, I chose the penultimate stanza from W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939.