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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,828 posts.
Supporting a programming language at Meta is a very careful and deliberate decision. We’re sharing our internal programming language guidance that helps our engineers and developers choose the best…
TL;DR Looking at job postings, Rails is more popular than Django, Laravel or Express. By a lot. If you specifically measure startup cities…
The library for web and native user interfaces
How I learnt the basics of Go (its good parts as well as a few quirks) by porting a medium-sized web backend from Python.
On a lobste.rs thread about the rationale for the Fennel language, I posted this summary of why Oil exists:
The idea is to come up with some kind of category, so that people have something to remember all the names by. Some categories: Geographical (countries, cities, parks, rivers, lakes, streets), entertainment (flintsones, simpsons, disney films, celebrities), companies (hotels, airports, local shops, restarants)…
One of my recent hobby projects was a blocks-based tool for doing basic data science , and I was very pleased when its test suite reached 100% line coverage. However, Inozemtseva2014 found that code coverage is a poor predictor of how effective a test suite is at detecting bugs once the size of the test suite is…
Up until now, GraalVM has offered two ways to run Java programs: using the Java HotSpot VM with the GraalVM JIT (just-in-time) compiler…
I hear a lot of talk these days about TDD and BDD and Extreme Programming and SCRUM and stand up meetings and all kinds of methodologies and techniques for developing better software, but it’s all irrelevant unless the software we’re building meets the needs of those that are using it. Let me put that another way. A…
When I finished school in 2010 (yep, along time ago now), I wanted to go try and make it as a musician. I figured if punk bands could just learn on the job, I could too. But my mum insisted that I needed to do something, just in case. So I went down to the local TAFE (this is like a trade school in Australia, though…
Algebraic data types and algebraic data structures sound similar. It’s like they ought to be the same thing. But they’re not. They both have ‘algebraic’ in the name, so it’s confusing. I got them mixed up at times. Others have too. But, they’re different concepts. Understanding the difference will help if you’re…
Note: I just spoke at Coldfront 2017 about why I’m such a big proponent of the Web. What follows is essentially that talk as a blog post (I’ll add a link to the video once it is published).
How our mind falls short trying to short cut.
Chrome engineers are experimenting with Rust. For the foreseeable future, C++ is the reigning monarch in our codebase, and any use of Rust will need to fit in with C++ — not the other way around. This seems to present some C++/ Rust interoperability challenges which nobody else has faced.
A discussion of software design and programming anti-patterns to know for every programmer, with examples.
We are standardizing OpenAI’s deep learning framework on PyTorch.
In April, 1984, my father bought a computer for his home office, a Luxor ABC-802 , with a Z80 CPU, 64 kilobytes of RAM, a yellow-on-black screen with 80 by 25 text mode, or about 160 by 75 pixels in graphics mode, and two floppy drives. It had BASIC in its ROM, and came with absolutely no games. If I wanted to play…
Over on GitHub, David Yu has an interesting performance benchmark for function calls of various Foreign Function Interfaces ( FFI ):
For many of us, the simplicity, elegance, and performance of Apple’s hardware and software working together are the reason why we build on their platforms. And yet, after just a few months of working with Swift, Cocoa has begun to lose its luster.
Last week, I described a use-case for a custom Stream Collector. I received a intriguing comment on Twitter: There was a 'Moved Permanently' error fetching URL: 'https://twitter.com/Miguucm/status/1389258245886390292' Hats off to you, Miguel! Your comment revealed a method I didn’t know! So I decided to investigate…
This post outlines the evolution of the EYG editor. The major changes over time, design thoughts and some implementation notes.
Learn about OTP, a set of tools and libraries that Elixir inherits from Erlang.
searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably one of the largest in the world, at least for a public facing website. It’s actual size is 6.4 TB. Which is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours. …
It was a pleasure to research the material for the "Polygons of Another World" articles [1] . All the machines I studied were different from one another. The diversity I witnessed in the Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and Jaguar demonstrated the richness of a field then still in its dawn. As I concluded the…
