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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 744 posts.

2012
41

Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters

Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement. I can just imagine all sorts of amusing conversations with designers and business sponsors: “No... the size of this <input> field should be 23... 24 is just too long!” Or: “We need to explain…

45

Small

Looking down from his perch on the edge of space [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHtvDA0W34I], Felix Baumgartner remarked: > Sometimes you have to be really high, to see how small you really are. It turns out that this feeling is a well documented phenomena dubbed the Overview effect [http:

47

CoffeeScript: less typing, bad readability

I’ve used CoffeeScript for a few months now. Coming from Python, I felt that CoffeeScript was more concise than Javascript, so I decided to use it for a few small projects. Initially, it was a nice experience, but then I gradually realized that, while writing CoffeeScript code was very pleasant, reading it wasn’t so…

48

* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW

One of my least favorite parts about layout with CSS is the relationship of width and padding. You’re busy defining widths to match your grid or general column proportions, then down the line you start to add in text, which necessitates defining padding for those boxes. And ‘lo and behold, you now are subtracting…

56

Vim anti-patterns

The benefits of getting to grips with Vim are immense in terms of editing speed and maintaining your “flow” when you’re on a roll, whether writing code, poetry, or prose, but because the learning curve is so steep for a text editor, it’s very easy to retain habits from your time learning the editor that stick with you…