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Looming demise of the 10x developer – an era of enthusiast programmers is ending
Justin Searls on the looming demise of the 10x developer: Why an era of enthusiast programmers is coming to an end.
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
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Why is building a UI in Rust so hard?
Hear from a Warp engineer why building a UI in Rust is challenging. Learn about innovative solutions and approaches to tackle its strict memory management and lack of inheritance.
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Do you really know why you prefer REST over RPC?
A few weeks ago I’ve seen an interesting flock of tweets initiated by this question: This question and the tweets that followed put my brain on quite an animated discussion…
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Is Design Dead? (2004)
The rise of agile methods (particularly XP) makes some people wonder if there's any role left for software design. I argue that this change shifts from planned to evolutionary design.
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Cargo Cult Agile (2008)
Back in the 40's, the story goes, American troops landed on a remote island. The natives of the island had never seen modern civilization before, and were amazed by the men and materials Allied forces brought by the island. They watched the troops set up an airstrip and a tower, don headphones, and call great metal…
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Modern software controls dependencies because it helps software authors
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Web development is just broken
No, really, there’s something deeply flawed with web development. And I’m not (just) talking browser incompatibilities, or Ruby vs. Java vs. PHP vs. anything else or about Flash or HTML…
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The largest number representable in 64 bits
A rewrite of this blog post with many new insights and updates appeared in Jan 2026
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Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code
You can now sign up for ‘How to Solve It with Code’, which is a course in how to solve problems (including coding, writing, sysadmin, and research) using fast short iterations, and also provides a platform that makes this approach easier and more effective.
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Docs as code (2017)
author, Eric Holscher& the Write the Docs community,. Documentation as Code ( Docs as Code) refers to a philosophy that you should be writing documentation with the same tools as code: Issue Tr...
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On Scala
This is one of a series of posts on languages, you can read more about that here . Scala's blending of programming paradigms in a single language is impressive. It's fun to write code in and is a good language for leaning into the functional plus static typing paradigm. As much as I like
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Rails 3.2 Performance: Another Step Slower
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Rust, C++, and Python trends in jobs on Hacker News (February 2025)
How are Rust, C++, and Python trending on Hacker News in the job market? As a proxy measure for programming language trends, let’s analyze the frequency of programming language mentions in the mont…
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Memory safety without borrow checking, reference counting, or garbage collection
Single ownership is one of those concepts that's both easier and more powerful than we realize.
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Understanding the N + 1 queries problem
In this post, I am going to talk about the N + 1 queries problem. While trying to solve this problem myself recently, I noticed most of the blog posts only talk about the very simple version of the problem and the proposed solutions would break down when the use cases get complex. I will try to get into more depth and…
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Why we still build with Ruby
Why we still choose Ruby on Rails in 2025: Learn how Lago scales millions of API events with Rails, Go, and Rust, balancing developer speed, concurrency, and performance.
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Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
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The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it. It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built in all the wrong ways. Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software…
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I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year
My wife and I have been looking for an app to track things like habits, hobbies, and when we last did certain chores.To be honest there are probably hundreds of different habit trackers on the App Store. Next to todo list apps they are supposed to be the easiest apps to create so it is not really that surprising there…
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Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again
On why bitmap fonts still carry more life than most default tech type.
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Write Code Like You Write a Recipe
It starts innocently enough - the business needs you to write a program to automate creating peanut butter cookies (yum).
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Locality of Behaviour (2020)
Carson Gross explores the Locality of Behaviour (LoB) principle, which emphasizes making the behavior of code units obvious on inspection to enhance maintainability. He discusses the tradeoffs between LoB and other software design principles like DRY and SoC, offering insights on balancing clarity, abstraction, and…
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JEP 325: Switch Expressions
Extend the switch statement so that it can be used as either a statement or an expression, and that both forms can use either a "traditional" or "simplified" scoping and control flow behavior. These changes will simplify everyday coding, and also prepare the way for the use of pattern matching (JEP 305) in switch …
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