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Behold z, the unsung jewel that rethinks shell navigation
I spend a fair amount of time wandering around in the terminal. The chances are that you are too since you dared to open this story. My daily activities led me …
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,517 posts.
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What I learned from Erlang about resiliency in systems design (2019)
Failure in computer systems is inevitable. Adopting Erlang's philosophy of "Let it crash" at the many layers of abstractions in software can have a huge positive impact on resiliency.
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OpenBSD's Pledge and Unveil from Python
Years ago, OpenBSD gained two new security system calls, pledge(2) (originally tame(2) ) and unveil . In both, an application surrenders capabilities at run-time. The idea is to perform initialization like usual, then drop capabilities before handling untrusted input, limiting unwanted side effects. This feature is…
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Things I learned writing my first technical book
A hundred things I learned writing my first technical book “Data-Oriented Programming”
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Object-Oriented Entity-Component-System Design
About two months ago, I decided to start developing a fresh codebase for my voxel project – something that many indie developers are probably all-too familiar with, including myself. This time around, there were three major features that I wanted to implement:
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Write an SQL query builder in 150 lines of Python
This is the fourth article in a series about writing my own SQL query builder. Today, we'll rewrite it from scratch, explore API design, learn when to be lazy, and look at worse and better ways of doing things – all in 150 lines of Python!
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C++20 Concepts: The Definitive Guide
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T-Wand: beating Lucene in less than 600 lines of code
The design of Datalevin's compact Clojure search engine, its T-Wand algorithm, and the full-text search benchmarks comparing it with Apache Lucene.
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Ideal divisors: when a division compiles down to just a multiplication
The division instruction is one of the most expensive instruction in your CPU. Thus optimizing compilers often compile divisions by known constants down to a multiplication followed by a shift. However, in some lucky cases, the compiler does not even need a shift. I call the corresponding divisors ideal. For the math…
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Hotwire: A new old way to build web apps
I’d like to share my experience of encountering Hotwire from the team at Basecamp which was extracted from the tooling used to build their…
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Customizing GPT-3 for Your Application
Fine-tune with a single command.
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Let's write a compiler, part 3: A parser
Tokenizing the source code input is a great start for our compiler. Now let's turn our attention to parsing the PL/0 grammar. Once we have finished with the parser, the front end of our compiler will be finished and we will have a PL/0 validator. This is a program that can read in PL/0 source code and inform the user…
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How .NET container images are maintained
An update on using .NET and containers together, learn how to tackle staying safe and keeping your container images up-to-date.
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Cranelift, Part 2: Compiler Efficiency, CFGs, and a Branch Peephole Optimizer
This post is the second in a three-part series about Cranelift . In the first post , I described the context around Cranelift and our project to replace its backend code-generation infrastructure, and detailed the instruction-selection problem and how we solve it. The remaining two posts will be deep-dives into some…
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Don’t use environment variables for configuration
Suppose you need to create a function for adding two numbers together in plain C. How would you write it? What sort of an API would it have?...
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How you can track your personal finances using Python
In this post, I'd like to describe how you can track your personal finances using a workflow that is highly focused on data privacy, is 100% self-hosted, and uses only the Python ecosystem.
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Tiny ELF Files: Revisited in 2021
Quick edit: While I work on a proper update, I'll note here that several posters on reddit and hackernews have pointed out ways to bring the total size of the program down to 105 bytes while still printing the full "Hello, world!" Much credit goes to Josh Triplett , who produced the 105-byte version which you can find…
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Cheating at a company group activity using Unix tools
The tools you didn’t know you need
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Where are we going from here? Software engineering needs formal methods
The job of a software engineer is not to produce code, but to solve problems; we just happen to solve most of those problems by producing code. Ultimately, producing code is hard, and we need help. That's why GitHub's Copilot is exciting, but it's far from ideal, and it's the tip of the iceberg of what's been done and…
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You shouldn't invoke setup.py directly
The setup.py interface is an old convention from distutils, one that has bugs that cannot be fixed to bring it into line with modern Python packaging approaches. As a result, all direct...
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C++20 Modules with GCC11
Introduction One of the headline changes of the C++20 standard is the inclusion of modules. Modules promise to significantly change the structure of C++ codebases and possibly signal headers’ ultimate demise (but probably not in my lifetime). It also opens the door to potentially have a unified build system and…
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Work with GitHub Actions in Your Terminal with GitHub CLI
As of 1.9.0, GitHub Actions is available in your terminal. Two new top-level commands, `gh run` and `gh workflow`, provide insight into workflow runs.
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The Elements of Git
This is not a tutorial. If you're looking for a quick, easy, "how to use git" kind of post, look elsewhere.The goal of this post is to give you just enough understanding of the git internals that you can build up a correct intuition of what various git commands actually do under the hood.
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Plotnine: Grammar of Graphics for Python (2019)
Blog article by Jeroen Janssens. Jul 7, 2024. 93 min read. Hey there, you’re reading an updated version of a post I published way back in 2019. Because of the 2024 Plotnine contest and the recent release of Polars 1.0, I decided to freshen things up. Changes include: Upgrade to Plotnine version 0.13.6 (from…
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Rust data structures with circular references
To implement its safety guarantees, the Rust compiler keeps careful track of ownership and references throughout a program. This makes writing certain kinds of data structures challenging; in particular, data structures that have circular references.
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Modern C++ for C Programmers (2018)
Welcome to part 1 of Modern C++ for C Programmers, please see the introduction for the goals and context of this series. In this part we start with C++ features that you can use to spice up your code ’line by line’, without immediately having to use all 1400 pages of ‘The C++ Programming Language’. Various code…