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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,508 posts.
The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the…
We're excited to share the results of our 10th annual developer survey! 65,000 developers shared their thoughts on the state of software today.
I've been porting the AndroidX collection library to Kotlin multiplatform to experiment with binary compatibility, performance, tooling, and the different memory models. Some of the data structures in the library use array-based binary trees to store elements. The Java code has a lot of shifts to replace power-of-two…
With Django 3.1, you can put async code in production if you don’t have to do heavy-lifting with some parts of Django that don’t support async yet.
The Snap! Community. Snap! is a blocks-based programming language built by UC Berkeley and used by hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world.
How to keep your modules compatible with prior minor/patch versions.
Recently I found myself needing to process and visualize both point clouds and meshes in an iOS application utilizing ARKit, with the point cloud being gathered using the 2020 iPad “LiDAR” sensor. To enable maximum performance and content creation convenience I thought it would be nice to have both custom shaders and…
I was really surprised to learn that Swift recently adopted Smalltalk keyword syntax: [Accepted] SE-0279: Multiple Trailing Closures . Tha...
Learn why Git flow complicates the lifecycle and discover an alternative to streamline development.
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
Developers write tests to ensure correctness and allow future changes to be made safely. However, as the number of features grows, so does the number of tests. Tests are a double-edged sword. On one hand, well-written ones catch bugs and maintain a program’s stability, but as the code base grows, a high number of…
Over the past couple weeks I've been trying to work out how I want to store my game configuration. At first I started playing with XML, which was nice because I could stream a file rather than loading the entire thing into memory but I turned away from XML because …
We migrated from Mercurial to Git in 2014 to improve local performance and began consolidating our repositories that hosted our backend code. But as this monorepo grew, we experienced Git performance issues that grew linearly with the number of files we added. Inconveniently, this problem was the most severe on…
Discussions of coroutines and user-mode threads — like Project Loom's virtual threads or Go's goroutines — frequently turn to the subject of performance. The question I'll try answering here is, how do user-mode threads offer better application performance than OS threads?
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
I have been curious about data compression and the Zip file format in particular for a long time. At some point I decided to address that by learning how it works and writing my own Zip program. The implementation turned into an exciting programming exercise; there is great pleasure to be had from creating a well…
The industry has embraced statically typed languages, but API design remains twenty years in the past. Schema driven development presents an opportunity to pull API design into the present.
The questioning of the VBA languages lifespan seems to be a question that is on everyone’s mind. Let’s explore why so many people utilize this language, Microsoft’s current thinking on it’s uses, and when it will ultimately retire from being used.
If you follow me on facebook you know that I’ve been publishing daily CoronaVirus statistics. I generate these statistics using the daily updates in the Johns Hopkins github repository .
My VPS will soon expire, so I've decided to try to automate its deployment. After spending evening by studying Ansible alternatives, I've decided to use pyinfra, and I am quite happy with it.
A roundup of some of the key ways in which Swift 5.3 enhances the overall experience of building views using SwiftUI.
Copying and pasting can be dangerous, but then again, so can many aspects of software development when done incautiously. In this post, I’ll take a look at what code copying actually means for software development, what good code theft means, and the pitfalls of copying badly.
One of the unspoken areas about software development is building usable software.
An article covering everything you need to know about time on Unix. Time, a word that is entangled in everything in our lives, something we're intimately familiar with. Keeping track of it is important for many activities we do.
So far everything we’ve done with breakpoints involved us creating a breakpoint file and using this to automate part of a track. Now we’ll take a look at how we can take an existing track and extract some breakpoints from this. For this post, we’ll take a look at extracting the amplitudes from the .wave files, as this…
