Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 653 posts.

Software Engineering
489

Sometimes Kill -9 Isn't Enough

If there’s one thing to know about distributed systems, it’s that they have to be designed with the expectation of failure. It’s also safe to say that most software these days is, in some form, distributed—whether it’s a database, mobile app, or enterprise SaaS. If you have two different processes talking to each…

497

Go, REST APIs, and Pointers

One of the more interesting design challenges with go-github (and subsequently the one that results in the most questions) is the use of pointers for most all of the fields in our structs that are marshaled and passed to the GitHub API. After a fair amount of trial and error, I settled on the approach that I’m going…

506

Links 2013

I’m trying to build a jigsaw puzzle. I wish I could show you what it will be, but the picture isn’t on the box. But I can show you some of the pieces that snapped into place this year, and try to share a context for why they mattered so much to me.