Character sets and internationalization. I just spent a year building a one-way libiconv-ish library called cpgtou, including chasing down MS-DOS Code Page 709. https://github.com/torstenvl/cpgtou
Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
71–80 of 112 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#72The demoscene. All the malarkey the Lisp hackers got up to.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#73Event driven declarative programming for user interfaces hits the spot for me. Built my career around it
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#74something zero copy / in-memory or a 3D game
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#75Whenever I get bored (rarely these days) I like to write path-finding & annealing algorithms. I start with a super simple ray-tracing framework I first wrote in the 1990's for visualization, and then I play around with things like gravity and electromagnetic repulsion / attraction. My favorite thing to do is watch a million charged spheres distribute themselves on a weird surface obeying gravity and electromagnetics,…
There was an old Stanford site with some basic interactive tools to visualize "electromagnetic particles". In one of them you would just sling electrons around a neutron and watch their orbits.
I credit it for being one of the reasons I learned to code because it made me think about how cool it was that somebody built that. (I was ~9 years old.)
Now I think I'll have to go finally reimplement that site from memory! I'm sure I can brute force the math with the help of Copilot :P
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#76My favorite subgenre is when my commit looks like: 3 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 562 deletions(-)
I was once added to a team to help improving their code base. At the end of the project they made an overview how many lines each of the team members added to the code base. Mine was negative. :)
Who / what company added you to do that? How did they get convinced you could do that job?
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#77Lately I've been playing around with learning type theory and writing parsers and langauges. But I seem to gravitate towards writing code to decode various file formats. Over the years I've reverse engineered Apple Notes database, written code to read the realm database backing Craft.app, code to read couchdb files, lucene files, git pack files, sqlite databases (I have js code that runs queries against raw database…
Not my area at all, but reverse-engineering file formats sounds really interesting. Do you have a blog by any chance?
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#78My favorite programming niche is SEO optimization. I really like optimizing pages and see the traffic grow.
Are you good at it? How long does it take to do 80% of the job? Do you freelance?
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#79I really like reading RFCs and then implementing the protocols that they describe. Preferably just do it in some plain language without any libraries, just plain old TCP/UDP.
What have been some highlights for you? This is something that's struck me in passing a couple of times as a potentially interesting kind of project.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#80Working in a relational language, to resurrect the spirit of the Base/FoxPro family:
This is the thing I wish to do full time, but even if not is so interesting! Is not just "making a programming language" is that it touch parts of "make a in-memory database" + "array programming for the masses" that makes it more challenging!