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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 599 posts.

2015
245

Modern Extreme Programming

There was a recent discussion on the Extreme Programming mailing list kicked off by Ron Jeffries saying he wants his XP back. The implication being that Extreme Programming is no longer practised, and that most “Agile” organisations are actually practising Flaccid Scrum – some agile process but little of the technical…

246

Bug finding is slow in spite of many eyeballs

"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" The saying (also known as Linus' law) doesn't say that the bugs are found fast and neither does it say who finds them. My version of the law would be much more cynical, something like: "eventually, bugs are found", emphasizing the 'eventually' part. (Jim Zemlin apparently…

250

Sabotage

In many places it seems to have become the norm to celebrate overwork, sleep deprivation and chronic stress. Ordinarily if you reveal that you are unhappy, unproductive and causing yourself mental and physical harm, people will be concerned and try to intervene. However, the expected response to this kind of suffering…

253

Interviewing for a JavaScript Job

“The Carpenter” was a JavaScript programmer, well-known for a meticulous attention to detail and love for hand-crafted, exquisitely joined code. The Carpenter normally worked through personal referrals, but from time to time a recruiter would slip through his screen. One such recruiter was Bob Plissken. Bob was…

256

How to Write a New Git Protocol

I used to have trouble keeping track of my files. I often couldn’t remember whether I saved a file on my desktop, laptop, or phone, or if it was floating around in the cloud somewhere. Plus, with certain information, like passwords and bitcoin keys, I didn’t feel comfortable just sending that in an email to myself in…

258

What is Flask-Admin?

So what is Flask-Admin ? I'm seeing a lot of misunderstanding about the project. Typical Flask advice regarding administrative interface looks like this - "just write one from scratch, all these CRUD frameworks are very limiting". Well, I can't agree with the opinion and going to explain why.

264

How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)

In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules…

266

Being Sneaky in C

I entered the 2014 Underhanded C Contest last year. Didn't win, but hey-ho what can you do. Still, I thought I'd post my entry and a write-up of it, in case anyone found it interesting.

267

Porting a NES Emulator from Go to Nim

Let me get this straight. We have an emulator for 1985 hardware that was written in a pretty new language (Go), ported to a language that isn’t even 1.0 (Nim), compiled to C, then compiled to JavaScript? And the damn thing actually works? That’s kind of amazing.

268

Dark corners of Unicode

I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a…