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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,013 posts.

2014
877

Formal Methods in Building Robust Distributed Systems

We all know that when designing and operating applications at scale, it is persistent state management that brings the most difficult challenges. Delivering state-free applications has always been (fairly) easy. But most interesting commercial and consumer applications need to manage persistent state. Advertising…

878

When TDD Doesn't Work

Over the years many people have complained about the so-called “religiosity” of some of the proponents of Test Driven Development. The recent brouhaha over TDD has, once again, brought these complaints to the fore. So I thought it would be a good idea to talk about when TDD does not work.

883

Clojure 2013 Year in Review

This is my third Clojure year-in-review post. In 2011 I was excited about Clojure 1.3, ClojureScript, and the second Clojure/conj. By 2012 I was blown away by four Clojure conferences, two O’Reilly books, reducers, Datomic, Immutant, and a partridge in a pear tree.

884

The Colors of Chemistry

This notebook documents my exploration of color theory and its applications to photochemistry. It also shows off the functionality of several Julia packages: Color.jl for color theory and colorimetry, SIUnits.jl for unitful computations, and Gadfly.jl for graph plotting.

887

OCaml on iOS 7 Released

Pansophical reader, with your bafflingly good mobile OCaml project, I’m ready at last to release an OCaml compiler for iOS 7. It works for all my projects, and I hope it works for yours.

892

Typographic Programming Language

Allow me to present a simple thought experiment. Suppose we didn’t need to store our code as ASCII text on disk. Could we change the way we write – and more importantly read – symbolic code? Let’s assume we have a magic code editor which can read, edit, and write anything we can imagine. Furthermore, assume we have a…

900

Ghost 0.4 Released

Today we are releasing Ghost 0.4 - the next minor release of the Ghost blogging platform. With a great deal of shiny new things. This release represents a total of 374 commits across 178 issues from 88 incredible contributors all over the world. It's a cleaner, faster, more sophisticated