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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,829 posts.
Give your agents, developers, and automations a home for code and data. We’ve just launched Artifacts: Git-compatible versioned storage built for agents. Create tens of millions of repos, fork from any remote, and hand off a URL to any Git client.
The third edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is now available for purchase or to read for free online . It has updated content and several new chapters, but one chapter that was left on the cutting room floor was "Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams" . I present the 26-page rough draft chapter in this…
In part one of this series we introduced the idea of a message log, touched on why it’s useful, and discussed the storage mechanics behind it. In part two, we discuss data replication. We have our log. We know how to write data to it and read it back as well as how data is persisted. The caveat to this is, although we…
DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself is frequently touted as a principle of software development. "Copy-pasta" is the derisive term applied to a violation of it, tying together the concept of copying code and pasta as description of software development bad practices (see also spaghetti code ).
Code reviews are one of the most important parts of the software development process At Meta we’ve recognized the need to make code reviews as fast as possible without sacrificing quality We’re sha…
Unique identifiers play a crucial role in all applications, from user authentication to resource management. While using a standard UUID will satisfy all your security concerns, there’s a lot we can improve for our users.
A little over 3 years ago Microsoft announced that they were open sourcing large parts of the .NET framework and as Scott Hanselman said in his Connect 2016 keynote, the community has been contributing in a significant way:
One large difference between C and most other programming languages is that in C, you have to handle memory yourself rather than having a garbage collector do it for you. Ensuring that memory is allocated at the correct moment is not very difficult (and something that needs to be done manually in pretty much every…
Ruby 3.0 is a lot faster than Ruby 2.0, with both incremental tuning and interesting new disruptive changes. 'Three times faster' is hard to define. JIT! Ractors! Autofibers!
One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…
Go 1.18 Beta 1 is our first preview of Go 1.18. Please try it and let us know if you find problems.
Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…
GTK 4.14 will be released very soon, with new renderers that were introduced earlier this year. The new renderers have much improved support for fractional scaling—on my system, I now use 125% scaling instead of the 'Large Text' setting, and I find that works fine for my needs. Magical numbers Ever since 4.0, GTK…
The PyCon US 2021 recordings are available on our YouTube channel . Be sure to subscribe to our channel for notifications of new content. T...
APIs are like bones: sometimes you have to break them to mend them, and it fucking hurts. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it reflects an observation of (superficially) pragmatic behavioural t…
Parallel evolution.
The Open 7400 Logic Competition is a crowd-sourced contest with a simple but broad criteria for entry: build something interesting out of discrete logic chips. It's now in its second year, and this time around I was inspired to enter it.
I have developed some interest in the Rust programming language. Rust is a systems programming language which means it gets out of the way of developers interested in reaching low-level internals of a system. What sets it aside from other systems languages though is: Borrow checking to guarantee memory safety…
My Helix editor config and how I am using it
