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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 514 posts.
You get it for free, but you don’t have a stake and you don’t have negotiating power. Â Instead, try to work with services that give you an exit plan or that have the safety stamp of an aGPL license . 1
For the past month or so I've been working on writing my own ORM in Python. The project grew out of a need for a lightweight persistence layer for use in Flask web apps. As I've grown so familiar with the Django ORM over the past year, many of the ideas in Peewee are analagous to the concepts in Django. My goal from…
Code like you speak. Like making computers do your bidding? Enjoy Python features like lambdas? Indent-grouping? List comprehensions, but tired of OLD MAN PYTHON telling YOU how to...
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
The first two articles in this series, “ Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast ” and “ Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach ,” introduced the foundation of DFA-based and NFA-based regular expression matching. Both were based on toy implementations optimized for teaching the basic…
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
Ron Jeffries attempts to create a sudoku solver - here , here , here , here and here . (You really ought to read these articles. They are u...
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
The Man in Blue showcases the writing and Web design of Cameron Adams.
Every developer integrates their work into mainline at least every day.
In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were all closed as follows:
An introduction to the Go's defer, panic, and recover control flow mechanisms.
This page collects resources about implementing regular expression search efficiently.
Effective Emacs Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ 10 Specific Ways to Improve Your Productivity With Emacs Emacs is the world's best text editor. It's not just the best for editing program source; it's the best for any kind of text-editing. Mastering Emacs will make you more effective at writing and
Raise your hand if you know how to validate an email address. For those of you with your hand in the air, put it down quickly before someone sees you. It’s an odd sight to see someone sitting alone at the keyboard raising his or her hand. I was speaking metaphorically.
Five years ago I wrote Classical Inheritance in JavaScript ( Chinese Italian Japanese ) . It showed that JavaScript is a class-free, prototypal language, and that it has sufficient expressive power to simulate a classical system. My programming style has evolved since then, as any good programmer's should. I have…
I’ve been doing a lot of work, lately, with JavaScript inheritance – namely for my work-in-progress JavaScript book – and in doing so have examined a number of different JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating techniques. Out of all the ones that I’ve looked at I think my favorites were the implementations…
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
The scrypt key derivation function and encryption utility
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
I've been hanging out in the #mercurial and #bitbucket channels on freenode a lot lately, and I've noticed a topic that comes up a lot is "how does Mercurial 's branching differ from git 's branching?"
A while back I did a series of postings on the topic of Common Misconceptions About Publishing.
Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about "proof of concept." These rough edges make academics reluctant to release their software. But, that doesn't mean they shouldn't.
This PEP proposes the merger of the Unladen Swallow project 3 into CPython’s source tree. Unladen Swallow is an open-source branch of CPython focused on performance. Unladen Swallow is source-compatible with valid Python 2.6.4 applications and C extensi...
