Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 334 posts.

Tools & Productivity
244

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…

250

Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?

Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…

257

Announcing .NET Core Tools 1.0

Today, we are releasing .NET Core Tools 1.0. It’s an exciting day and an important milestone in the .NET Core journey. The tools are supported on Windows, macOS and Linux. You can use them at the command-line, with VS Code or as part of Visual Studio 2017. You can download the new .NET Core tools […]

263

Scaling Git, and some back story

A couple of years ago, Microsoft made the decision to begin a multi-year investment in revitalizing our engineering system across the company. We are a big company with tons of teams – each with their own products, priorities, processes and tools. There are some “common” tools but also a lot of diversity – with VERY…

266

Arq 5.8.5 for Mac Fixes a Bad Bug

I hate writing blog posts like this. In Arq 5.7.9 we changed the way Arq caches the list of objects at the destination for AWS, Google Drive and Google Cloud Storage. For those 3 destination types, all non-packed objects were stored in one “objects” directory. If you had years of backups and/or terabytes of data, […]