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Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

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Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#41

The Big TDD Misunderstanding https://linkedrecords.com/the-big-tdd-misunderstanding-8e22c...

This is pretty good and much of it resonates with my recent thinking on testing (I seem to revisit this topic every few years and rethink testing in general). I appreciate that it's pragmatic and not dogmatic. There's a lot of "tradition" in testing that has kind of built up over the years and not a lot of questioning the assumptions. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#43
post #21

The 'eu' in eucatastrophe – Why SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle https://labs.quansight.org/blog/building-scipy-with-flang

Wow! Thanks for sharing. Sometimes I get disheartened about programming, then posts like this remind me how complicated the world actually is. And how much perseverance and elbow grease we put in to make the world simpler.

Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest missing element, in my mind, of the pro-"classicist" and anti-"mockist" view is that the practice of writing unit tests with mocking leads to refactoring your code until it works with that approach, which in turn leads to better-designed code. I don't like the emphasis of "yeah but refactoring code leads to needing to rewrite mocked tests", because if you've designed your code well, then the need to adjus…

You can only get away with poorly designed code if that's not caught in the code review. I'd argue that while that might be a nice side benefit of some testing practices, forcing you to rewrite your code isn't relevant to the test - in fact the opposite! Your tests should work irrespective of your code's internals! (Also, you can easily run integration tests in parallel with a little planning and attention to detail.…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#45
post #32

Another shameless plug. I'm pretty proud of my Learning Zig series (1). It's been translated into Chinese, Russian and Korean. Some may know my other writings (e.g. Little Go/Redis/MongoDB Book). I don't feel like I captured Zig quite as well, but it's hopefully a useful resources especially if you're coming from a garbage collected language. (1) https://www.openmymind.net/learning_zig/

I have read your blogs and The Little Go Book. I must say that they are great. Thank you for writing those and keep writing.

Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have a specific post? I think entire blog would be too big to check out, just to be in line with this post

These are some of my favourites: - https://danluu.com/culture/ - https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ - https://danluu.com/wat/ - https://danluu.com/look-stupid/

I do not know how real-world accurate it is, but I enjoy the p95 post. For a huge number of skills in my life, I got to an acceptable level of performance, and then more or less never developed it.

Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest missing element, in my mind, of the pro-"classicist" and anti-"mockist" view is that the practice of writing unit tests with mocking leads to refactoring your code until it works with that approach, which in turn leads to better-designed code. I don't like the emphasis of "yeah but refactoring code leads to needing to rewrite mocked tests", because if you've designed your code well, then the need to adjus…

You can only get away with poorly designed code if that's not caught in the code review. I'd argue that while that might be a nice side benefit of some testing practices, forcing you to rewrite your code isn't relevant to the test - in fact the opposite! Your tests should work irrespective of your code's internals! (Also, you can easily run integration tests in parallel with a little planning and attention to detail.…

> forcing you to rewrite your code isn't relevant to the test - in fact the opposite! Your tests should work irrespective of your code's internals!

Are you avoiding rewriting your code so you can write integration tests, or are you writing integration tests so you can avoid rewriting your code?

Those that have been around the block of refactoring code so you can write good unit tests, tend to realize that the better-designed code isn't a side benefit. It's the entire point. The test is the side benefit.

Integration tests should be avoided if the same coverage can be reached with a refactor and some unit tests. For instance, it's very common for components to rely on complicated combinations of state. For instance, imagine a nightmare component that has nine boolean state parameters. To integration-test every combination, that's 512 cases. But in cases like those, you might discover through refactoring that some of those state combinations can compressed. For instance, you might be able to refactor into three sub-components, each of which take three boolean parameters and return one boolean result, and where the parent component only depends on those three booleans, which can be mocked. So then in that case, you've reduced the amount of tests you need to write to 32 total... that's 1/16th the effort.

I mean, I know that in common practice, neither are done, and people just leave the component largely untested, and then get bug reports that they close as "Can't reproduce".

Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#48

This post on embeddings by simonw https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/

This one as well by a former intern from a decade ago who now writes on python and ml internals:

How Many Lines of C it Takes to Execute a + b in Python?

https://codeconfessions.substack.com/p/a-war-story-involving...

Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have a specific post? I think entire blog would be too big to check out, just to be in line with this post

These are some of my favourites: - https://danluu.com/culture/ - https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ - https://danluu.com/wat/ - https://danluu.com/look-stupid/

I really like the "culture matters" and "look stupid" posts. I've been allowing myself to look stupid since I was a kid in school. Dan is humble (frequently saying things such as "If an idiot like me can [do X]"), but I think this strategy requires a certain degree of intellectual security. For me the logic isn't just "this question may sound stupid but the knowledge gained outweighs that". It's also "this question may sound stupid but anyone who thinks I'm dumb is wrong".

Re: Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

#50
New amazing web security research by James Kettle:

Smashing the state machine: the true potential of web race conditions

https://portswigger.net/research/smashing-the-state-machine

The talk (on YouTube) is also absolutely brilliantly done.

James finds new vulnerabilities classes where others don’t even see potential for problems. Absolutely amazing!

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