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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,508 posts.

2020
2

Deno 1.0

Dynamic languages are useful tools. Scripting allows users to rapidly and succinctly tie together complex systems and express ideas without worrying about details like memory management or build systems.

8

CRDTs are the future

I saw Martin Kleppmann’s talk a few weeks ago about his approach to realtime editing with CRDTs, and I felt a deep sense of despair. Maybe all the work I’ve been doing for the past decade won’t be part of the future after all, because Martin’s

11

Can't you just right click?

In 2012, Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X (now macOS). When you try to run Mac software downloaded from the internet, Gatekeeper checks whether the software was signed with a valid Developer ID certificate. If not, then Gatekeeper refuses to run the software. Over the years, Gatekeeper has become more strict…

19

A half-hour to learn Rust

In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means? In this article, instead of focusing on one or...

22

Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions.

There’s a well-known quote by author Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I like it because it doesn’t attempt to be dogmatic: it encapsulates some basic guiding principles that get you 90% of the way there 90% of the time. Wikipedia describes the book the quote is from (emphasis mine):

27

Ruby 3.0

We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.0.0. From 2015 we developed hard toward Ruby 3, whose goal is performance, concurrency, and Typing. Especial...

28

Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

It took three years and 200,000 words more than I expected, but my second book, Crafting Interpreters , is complete. I finished the third draft of the last chapter today, marking the last of around 1,400 days of continuous writing.

29

Awk in 20 Minutes (2015)

Awk is a tiny programming language and a command line tool. It's particularly appropriate for log parsing on servers, mostly because Awk will operate on files, usually structured in lines of human-readable text.