Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 1,357 posts.

Software Engineering
9

Dotfile madness

My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn't belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can't place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear…

20

Goodbye Joe

Today, we've learned of Joe's passing away. I wasn't a super close friend of Joe, but I have known him and talked with him at various conferences over the last ten years or so. He's unsurprisingly been a huge influence in my career, and so I thought I should write this little post about him and his impact.

23

Give Me Back My Monolith

It feels like we’re starting to pass the peak of the hype cycle of microservices. It’s no longer multiple times a week we now see a blog post of “How I migrated my monolith to 150 services”. Now I often hear a bit more of the counter: “I don’t hate my monolith, I just care that things stay performant”. We’ve actually…