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Software Engineering

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

2010
252

Deprecating XML

Someone asked me recently what I thought about XML being removed from the Twitter streaming API. Around the same time, I heard that Foursquare are also moving to a JSON-only API.

254

New Programming Jargon

Every field comes up with its own jargon, and oftentimes subgroups within a field come up with their own specific words or phrases (those of you familiar with Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team know that we have our own term for “broken”, named after one of our teammates who is notorious for…

264

C++: A language for next generation web apps

On Monday, I was pleased to be an uninvited speaker at <a href="http://devwaterloo.pbworks.com/">Waterloo Devhouse</a>, hosted in <a href="http://postrank.com">Postrank's</a> magnificent office. After making some surreptitious alterations to their agile development wall, I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on how C++ can…

265

You can’t beat a good compiler…. right?

It is extremely well worn conventional wisdom that for your “average” programmer, it’s pretty much impossible to beat a good optimizing compiler at writing fast code. For those who skip the “understanding” part, and jump straight into the “application” part, this rule of thumb tends to be grossly misunderstood, and…