Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 994 posts.

Software Engineering
153

The “No Code” Delusion

Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this, and I think some of the “no code” tools are…

162

The database I wish I had

I watched the talk " Platform as a Reflection of Values: Joyent, Node.js and beyond " by Bryan Cantrill, and I think he was able to put into words something I already felt for some time: if there’s no piece of software out there that reflects your values, it’s time for you to build that softwarefootnote:talk-time[ At…

171

No Config for Old Men

Ask anyone who's really into cooking and they'll tell you how important it is to have a kitchen that's arranged just right. To someone who rarely cooks, a kitchen is probably just a place to store a few pots and a toaster, and the placement of such stuff doesn't matter much: canned soup and microwave dinners are…

173

The Failed Promise of Web Components

Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers. Remember how exciting it was every time we got new shiny HTML elements that actually do stuff ? Remember how exciting it was to be able to do sliders, color pickers…