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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
MongoDB is perhaps the most-widely-mocked piece of software out there right now. While some of the mockery is out-of-date or rooted in misunderstandings, much of it is well-deserved, and it’s difficult to disagree that much of MongoDB’s engineering is incredibly simplistic, inefficient, and immature compared to…
Abstract Rust is a non-Garbage Collected (GCed) language, but the lack of GC makes expressing data-structures that require shared ownership awkward, inefficient, or both. In this paper we explore a new design for, and implementation of, GC in Rust, called Alloy . Unlike previous approaches to GC in Rust, Alloy allows…
Listen, I didn’t plan on making a whole ‘writing X like Y’ series. But here we are.
MATLAB still shines for math-heavy work. Its whiteboard-style syntax makes code easy to read, review, and run on modern tools like RunMat and fast GPUs.
So I built local.vibe — a friendly dashboard and local .vibe hostname for every local web app on your Mac. No more localhost:3000 vs localhost:5173 roulette.
A Date in JavaScript always represents a point in time (i.e. milliseconds since epoch). This is more apparent when printing out the full date string:
There are a lot of challenges in the way QA and engineering work together. Many eng leaders think you shouldn't have QA. I dig in.
There are a number of things that people theoretically know how to do, but which aren’t possible because of how software gets made. Some of these are almost forgotten, but there are at least …
Once upon a time there was an Erlang programmer who needed an FTP server running on one of the hosts in a private network. In fact he didn't...
(Previous post in the series was on Jai and can be found here)
Everything I learned to become a senior software engineer. From good skills to have, to dealing with difficult engineering problems.
He is the author of the famous auto-complete.el and you may be helped a lot by his implementation of native profiler merged in the latest Emacs release (24.3).
What inspires someone to become a software developer? Joel Spolsky and Clive Thompson discuss how the culture of coding has evolved over the decades and where they hope it’s headed next.
What’s left of NoSQL if they start adding ACID and SQL support?
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
Recently microservices have been getting a lot of attention, both positive and negative. Articles about them tend to fall into two camps, which I'll affectionately label the hipster camp and the neckbeard camp. The hipster camp tends to strongly favor microservices, due to the excellent benefits they provide regarding…
This is a cautionary tale. One of youth and a lesson I eventually learned but still often don’t heed. About how sometimes, the tool that is easiest to get started with isn’t the tool that will make your job the easiest.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
One of the things I love about Lisp is that it gives you the ability to change and mold the syntax of the language to what you need. In this post I want to look at the evolution of a little macro I've been playing around with for a while now.
It’s been a while since my last blog post, but I believe it’s better to post late than never, so here I am!
wingolog: article: conservative gc can be faster than precise gc
Even talking about building a monolith today, is a bit taboo. It is all about microservices at the moment, and has been for a few years. But they aren’t a silver bullet…
