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Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,747 posts.
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The Ingredients of a Productive Monorepo
So! Suppose you’re an intrepid engineer in a nascent Developer Productivity team. Your engineering organization has decided that it wants to move towards a monorepo . You’ve heard the stories told of Google, Meta, Uber - each a large technology company with developer productivity organizations consisting of hundreds…
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Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
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Scream cipher
You've probably heard of stream ciphers, but what about a scream cipher 😱? Today I learned there are more “Latin capital letter A” Unicode characters than there are letters in the English alphabet....
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A file format uncracked for 20 years
"I’ve had enough reasonable file formats fired at me in my time to tell you that wasn’t one" - Sam Fisher
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Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
Today, we're introducing Tidewave Web for Rails and Phoenix: a coding agent that runs directly in the browser alongside your web application, in your own development environment, with full page and code context.
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Recreating Daft Punk's Something About Us
An in-depth, personal journey recreating Daft Punk’s “Something About Us” in Ableton Live 12 — track by track. From synths to talkbox guitars, a nostalgic dive into French Touch culture, sound design, and the joys of music production.
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I spent a year making an ASN.1 compiler in D
In this post I’ll just rambling about ASN.1; parts of the compiler implementation, and some of the tool’s output rather than the tool itself as its still too WIP to really advertise on its own yet.
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Use Long Options in Scripts
Many command line utilities support short form options (-f) and long form options (--force). Short form is for interactive usage. In scripts, use the long form.
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Quake Engine Indicators
I was working on a bug in Chocolate Quake netcode. The issue was an edge case where starting two clients on the same machine resulted in the second one zombifying the first one. When the bug occurred there was no disconnection but the client could no longer move. Instead the screen would show an "indicator" looking…
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Writing a Rust GPU kernel driver: a brief introduction on how GPU drivers work
See how GPU drivers work thanks to VkCube in this Rust-based series for the development of Tyr.
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Moving on from React, a year later
A retrospective on making the switch from React to StimulusJS at Scholarly
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Agentic Coding Recommendations
Current recommendations of agentic coding.
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You can't design software you don't work on
Only the engineers who work on a large software system can meaningfully participate in the design process. That’s because you cannot do good software design…
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Compiling a neural net to C for a speedup
A cozy little corner of the web.
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A simple search engine from scratch
*if you include word2vec.
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Understanding Transformers Using a Minimal Example
Visualizing the internal state of a Transformer model
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Why Algebraic Effects?
Algebraic effects 1 (a.k.a. effect handlers) are a very useful up-and-coming feature that I personally think will see a huge surge in popularity in the programming languages of tomorrow. They’re one of the core features of Ante, as well as being the focus of many research languages including Koka , Effekt , Eff , and…
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Going down the rabbit hole of Git's new bundle-URI
Git's new bundle-uri could help significantly speed up clones, but what bugs lurk within?
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Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
Why Astro is perfect for content-driven sites: island architecture, zero JS by default, and blazing-fast performance.
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What .NET 10 GC changes mean for developers
.NET 10 GC tuning shows how stack allocations, DATAS, and region sizing cut allocations, improve latency, and reduce your cloud cost.
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I Built My Own Audio Player
In 2025, playing your own music on an iPhone is surprisingly hard, unless you pay Apple or navigate a maze of limitations. So I built my own player from scratch, with full text search, iCloud support, …
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The first year of free-threaded Python
A recap of the first year of work on enabling support for the free-threaded build of CPython in community packages.
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Left-Pad (2024)
8 years have passed since the the left-pad incident happened. It's been good for me to avoid this subject for focusing on actual work. Also, silence is gold. On the other hand, left-pad is seen as a notable event mentioned in books, so I'll share more info and thoughts about what exactly happened.
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Go 1.24's go tool is one of the best additions to the ecosystem in years
Why I'm very excited about `go tool` landing in Go 1.24.
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D2: Diagram Scripting Language
D2 is a diagram scripting language that turns text to diagrams. It stands for
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