Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 156 posts.

Infrastructure & DevOps
102

You can serve static data over HTTP

This will be short. I need to let some steam off and flush this thing out of my mind because it's already hanging around for too long. The story goes like this: we're prototyping small tool for whatever and we're at the point where there is a visible need to store some (most likely) static data. Oh, the thing is in…

104

Honey, I shrunk the NPM package

Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of an npm package? At its heart, it’s nothing more than a gzipped tarball. Working in software development, source code and binary artifacts are nearly always shipped as .tar.gz or .tgz files. And gzip compression is supported by every HTTP server and web browser…

113

Graceful behavior at capacity

Suppose we’ve got a service. We’ll gloss over the details for now, but let’s stipulate that it accepts requests from the outside world, and takes some action in response. Maybe those requests are HTTP requests, or RPCs, or just incoming packets to be routed at the network layer. We can get more specific later. What…

118

Service mesh use cases (2020)

Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble…