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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 514 posts.

2010
160

Open source Rails apps to study and learn from

If, like me, you learn best by studying other code here's five some open-source rails apps with something to teach. They're a great resource to study and improve your own code, or to use as the starting point for your own applications. All of these applications use Rails 2 but as they are open-source they are a great…

166

In defence of SQL

SQL is ugly but powerful, ORM is genuinely dumb, and "NoSQL" should really be called OMADS: Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores. Start every project with an RDBMS, add specialized stores where they fit, and stop apologizing for using SQL. Forty years on, nothing beats it for ad-hoc questions about your data.

168

Beautiful Code

O’Reilly just published Beautiful Code. I was invited to contribute, but I just could not go along with the premise. I disagree that beauty is a guiding principle of programming. Here is how …