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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 498 posts.

2009
103

Tables vs CSS: CSS Trolls begone

First mistake, drinking the CSS Kool-Aid Several weeks ago, I started designing the layout for my threaded comments on a social news site that I'm building. I had created a down and dirty layout using nested tables. It was ugly, and used nested tables but it worked. I was then paralized by guilt. I couldn't let the…

104

Why PHP won

When I first learned to program on the web, Perl + CGI was the dominant platform. But by the time I was building my first websites for com...

109

The impact of language choice on github projects

Although I spend a lot of my play-time fooling about with other languages, my professional and released code consists of Python, C, C++ and, alas, Javascript. I've lived in this tiny corner of the magic garden of modern software development for 10 years, and I'm itching to strike out in a different direction for my…

116

Writing Your Own Toy Compiler Using Flex, Bison and LLVM

Update (March 19 2010): this article was updated for LLVM 2.6 thanks to a great patch by John Harrison. He rocks! I’ve always been interested in compilers and languages, but interest only gets you so far. A lot of the concepts of compiler design can easily go way over most programmers’ heads, even the intelligent…