Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 1,420 posts.

Software Engineering
856

Why TDD isn't crap

After my recent vitriol about unit testing, a couple of people sent me Why TDD is Crap as a thorough debunking of TDD and unit testing. As someone very interested in software correctness, I ended up writing a debunking of his debunking. Transcriptions will be in quotes, my responses below. Some important notes: From…

865

Software architecture is failing

I doubt there has ever been a time when software architecture was seen as a raging success. The “three-tier architecture” of the web has held up extremely well and is an excellent place for many people to start. The “12 Factor App” approach has encouraged developers to adopt practices that make deployment and scaling…

866

Moving Java Forward Faster

For over twenty years the Java SE Platform and the JDK have evolved in large, irregular, and somewhat unpredictable steps. Each feature release has been driven by one or a few significant features, and so the schedule of each release has been adjusted as needed — sometimes more than once! — in order to accommodate the…

870

Filesystem error handling

We’re going to reproduce some results from papers on filesystem robustness that were written up roughly a decade ago : Prabhakaran et al. SOSP 05 paper , which injected errors below the filesystem and Gunawi et al. FAST 08 , which looked at how often filesystems failed to check return codes of functions that can…