Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 488 posts.

Software Engineering
95

ORM is an anti-pattern

ORM looks great early in a project but breaks down as complexity grows, forcing you to learn SQL anyway. Relations aren't objects. Either use NoSQL for object-like data or write a model layer with real SQL. ORM's abstraction is leaky, its efficiency poor, and the alternatives are better.

96

How to improve your programming skills

Learning new programming languages will expose you to new ways of thinking; especially if the new language uses a paradigm which you aren’t yet familiar with. Many of the ways of thinking that you will learn can be applied to languages that you already know, and you might even want to start using the new language for…

113

Back in the Django saddle

As a co-creator and one of the two Benevolent Dictators for Life of Django , my responsibility is to guide the open-source project forward. I did a great job of this for several years: from our open-sourcing in July 2005 (and for about two years prior to that), I was rather obsessed with it, contributing thousands of…