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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 894 posts.
What is slack doing? The process was in the background when this happened. I wasn't even interacting with it - I was in a meeting. I only noticed because my laptop fans were whurring when I got back. Restarting slack seemed to fix it for now. But that's not abnormal
Welcome! This is an instruction booklet that shows you how to build a text editor in C.
One of my uncles cursed me with the LEGO bug, when I was 6 he gave me his collection because he was going to university. My uncle and I are relatively close in age, my dad was the eldest of 8 children and he is the youngest. So, for many years I did nothing but play with lego, build all kinds of machinery and in…
I recently noticed that Google Docs has a pretty full-featured scripting system called Apps Script . It lets you write JavaScript to do some pretty useful things:
I’m passionate about image performance optimisation and making images load fast on the web. One of the most interesting areas of…
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
A few weeks ago a user on my site, cardgames.io , sent me a message saying that Mark Hamill had just tweeted a photo of himself playing Yahtzee . I looked, and sure enough, there it was:
A compiler is just a program that translates other programs. Traditional compilers translate source code into executable machine code that your computer understands. (Some compilers translate source code into another programming language. These compilers are called source-to-source translators or transpilers.) LLVM is…
I wrote a new tool this weekend, called Pipenv. Check it out on GitHub! Pipenv is an experimental project that aims to bring the best of all packaging...
Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law…
Handy Git tricks and aliases: leaderboards, praise, word-diff, branch history, daily recaps, changelog generation, and more in one quick guide.
It happens at least once in the lifetime of every programmer, project manager or teamleader. You get handed a steaming pile of manure, if you’re lucky only a few million lines worth, the original programmers have long ago left for sunnier places and the documentation - if there is any to begin with - is hopelessly out…
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
I've been writing React applications for a few years now, and I've noticed that some patterns tend to repeat themselves. In this post, I'll review these patterns which will summarize about 99% of the React code I write every day.
I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…
You can use of UUIDs as the primary key to avoid database scale problems. But should you? I propose an alternative.
A journey through a trendy hell
I found this gem on Hacker News the other day. User soneil posted to a four column version of the ASCII table that blew my mind. I just wanted to repost this here so it is easier to discover.
Five years ago I wrote a post that got some good attention on why you should use Postgres. Almost a year later I added a bunch of things I missed. Many of those items bear repeating, and I’ll recap a few of those in the latter half of this post. But in the last 4-5 years there’s been a lot of improvements and more…
Org Mode Syntax Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text
Mostly my opposition to Clojure is the JVM. That sh*t is heavy. This came up in the ZA Tech Slack team several weeks ago. While watching some Clojure talks...
