Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 1,508 posts.

Software Engineering
1028

AR with SceneKit and Metal

Recently I found myself needing to process and visualize both point clouds and meshes in an iOS application utilizing ARKit, with the point cloud being gathered using the 2020 iPad “LiDAR” sensor. To enable maximum performance and content creation convenience I thought it would be nice to have both custom shaders and…

1036

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…