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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,274 posts.

2018
991

Porting SBCL to the RISC-V

What better thing to do, during the hot, hot July days, thank something semi-mechanical involving very little brain power? With student-facing work briefly calming down (we've just about weathered the storm of appeals and complaints following the publication of exam results), and the all-too-brief Summer holidays…

992

The Real Deal About rel="me"

Earlier today , Barry Schwartz published a piece over on Search Engine Roundtable called Google Does Not Use rel=me Microformats . The article got shared around Twitter a lot, and those tweets surfaced on the microformats IRC channel . In it he mentions a few things that I would like to respond to, that is probably…

993

Giving Mono Souper Powers

By virtue of using LLVM, Mono has access to a wide suite of tools and optimization backends. A lot of active research uses LLVM IR. One such research project, Souper, tries to brute-force a search for missed optimizations in our emitted code. The .NET community may have software projects that benefit from using Souper…

999

The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003)

Unix tradition encourages the use of command-line switches to control programs, so that options can be specified from scripts. This is especially important for programs that function as pipes or filters. Three conventions for how to distinguish command-line options from ordinary arguments exist; the original Unix…

1000

Avoiding the Distributed Monolith

If you’re considering a microservices implementation, and you enjoy this post, you might also enjoy my more recent post Gasp! You Might Not Need Microservices. I recently read a post called The False Dichotomy of Monoliths and Microservices by Jimmy Bogard, which I absolutely loved. While reading through it I noticed…

1001

Modeling Redux with TLA+

Update 01/07/19 Greetings from 2019! The good news is that Chicago isn’t yet a radioactive crater. The bad news is almost everything I said about refinement in this article is wrong. I’m working on writing a more in-depth, rigorous treatment of refinement as its own article. But this one is currently explaining…

1012

Fuzzing Like It’s 1989

With 2019 a day away, let’s reflect on the past to see how we can improve. Yes, let’s take a long look back 30 years and reflect on the original fuzzing paper, An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities, and its 1995 follow-up, Fuzz Revisited, by Barton P. Miller. In this blog post, […]

1020

GRPC and JSON

So you’ve bought into this whole RPC thing and want to try it out, but aren’t quite sure about Protocol Buffers. Your existing code encodes your own objects, or perhaps you have code that needs a particular encoding. What to do? Fortunately, gRPC is encoding agnostic! You can still get a lot of the benefits of gRPC…