Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 514 posts.

Software Engineering
366

Speeding up a Git monorepo

We migrated from Mercurial to Git in 2014 to improve local performance and began consolidating our repositories that hosted our backend code. But as this monorepo grew, we experienced Git performance issues that grew linearly with the number of files we added. Inconveniently, this problem was the most severe on…

387

Taking PHP Seriously (2016)

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…