Top all-time · #2727
dodgycoder.net
Personal blog · dodgycoder.net · on HN as damian2000programmingcareer
dodgycoder.net is a personal blog at dodgycoder.net about programming and career. Since 2011, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 85 times, most often “Coding tricks of game developers”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Coding tricks of game developers9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-02-11
- Q&A With Nine Great Programmers4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-09-08
- Old school developers - achieving a lot with little3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-07-21
- Google's fiber leeching caper3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-02-20
- "Yoda Conditions", "Pokémon Exception Handling" and other programming classics3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-11-27
- Bill Atkinson, developer of MacPaint, on the art of developing software2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-05
- The Great AI Arbitrage: making a killing before your client wises up2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-07
- The "Bucket Bumping" problem of airline tickets, and how to minimise your fare2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-19
What Hacker News says?
Same idea as this game development legend https://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-dev... > he had put aside those two megabytes of memory early in the development cycle. He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory t…
Comment linking /2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html
on “All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk”Submitted Coding tricks of game developers as a story · 241 points
HN discussionJust a follow up to your 95 percentile rule, there is a famous story of Google exploiting this (in the early days before they were flush with money) in order to transfer their data to a new data center on the opposite coast. http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-cap...
Comment linking /2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-caper.html
on “Level3 is without peer, now what to do?”Submitted Google's fiber leeching caper as a story · 167 points
HN discussionThis hooks nicely back into the world of software development, and the anecdote about the senior game dev deleting a secret static 1MB buffer when their team hit their memory ceiling - http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve...
Comment linking /2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html
on ““Just remove the duck” (2013)”Submitted Taking control of a 36 year old NASA spacecraft using GNU radio as a story · 116 points
HN discussionHah, this is great! It reminds me of the classic static char buffer[1024*1024*2]; story from a few years back. http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve...
Comment linking /2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html
on “Potato paradox”Submitted Why was .NET called .NET? as a story · 92 points
HN discussionThey need a char-sized number, and memory used to be a tightly-budgeted commodity. Reminds me of this story of a game developer who magically got their game under the limit at the 11th hour http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve...
Comment linking /2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html
on “Teaching C”Submitted Q&A With Nine Great Programmers as a story · 81 points
HN discussionThese seem to come from here [0] which has more and some other general tips. [0] http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve...
Comment linking /2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html
on “Dirty Coding Tricks”Submitted Old school developers - achieving a lot with little as a story · 80 points
HN discussionI wasn't around at the time, but I suspect it's mainly because the first datacenters were on the West Coast. See e.g. the story at http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-cap...
Comment linking /2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-caper.html
on “Google Cloud Global Loadbalancer Outage”Submitted Why do Programmers get paid less than Project Managers or Business Analysts? as a story · 73 points
HN discussionOh yeah, this is very common in game development, and I'm pretty sure in other embedded dev too. There's a famous story about a game programmer who saved an entire production when it started crashing something like two weeks before shipping by commenting one line of code. Turned out the line of code was a malloc (of like a megabyte) that he'd added a year earlier, in anticipation of the game running out of memory. M…
Comment linking /2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html
on “Python’s Weak Performance Matters”Submitted The "Spanish Theory" of software project management as a story · 71 points
HN discussionDo you mean Empori? I think those guys failed because their business model was also in online retailing itself ... http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/08/empori-original-amazon-loc...
Comment linking /2012/08/empori-original-amazon-locker-from-12.html
on “Google acquires BufferBox (YC S12)”Submitted Programming Trends on StackOverflow as a story · 58 points
HN discussionThis article was posted here a while ago: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/07/old-school-developers-achi... It mentions that Ken Thompson "starts his projects by designing the data structures and then works bottom up". Adapting this approach solved several problems I was having during development.
Comment linking /2012/07/old-school-developers-achieving-lot.html
on “Torvalds' quote about good programmers”Submitted The decline of PCs and the rise of smartphones and tablets was predicted in 1993 as a story · 53 points
HN discussionThis article was an eye opener for me: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/07/old-school-developers-achi... "Old school developers - achieving a lot with little" I'll quote: > [Ken Thompson] debugs only via printf statements, hardly ever uses unit tests, starts his projects by designing the data structures and then works bottom up, with throwaway test stubs. Also, Joe Armstrong, the father of Erlang: > He uses prototypes…
Comment linking /2012/07/old-school-developers-achieving-lot.html
on “Torvalds' quote about good programmers”Submitted "Yoda Conditions", "Pokémon Exception Handling" and other programming classics as a story · 21 points
HN discussionHere's another anecdote (also sourced from Urs Hölzle) about how Google transferred 9TB of data to their new east coast datacentre via fibre, for free. http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-cap...
Comment linking /2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-caper.html
on “Urs Hölzle on Google's first data center”Submitted Bill Atkinson, developer of MacPaint, on the art of developing software as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> These days I live in NetBeans. It does everything I want, very cleanly simply and efficiently. It’s the nicest environment I’ve ever lived in. https://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/09/q-with-nine-great-program... It wasn't XEmacs, but rahter the genesis of Emacs itself (I got that wrong). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT__Nrr3PNI&t=1642s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs Got to love all the St. Thomas reques…
Comment linking /2012/09/q-with-nine-great-programmers.html
on “Development Environments”Submitted Coding tricks of game developers as a story · 7 points
HN discussionObligatory link to this classic blog post explaining heisenbug and many other classic programming puns: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2011/11/yoda-conditions-pokemon-ex...
Comment linking /2011/11/yoda-conditions-pokemon-exception.html?m=1
on “Heisenbug”Submitted Setting Up a Zeroconf Service on a Raspberry Pi & access it from an Android App as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAnother copy here: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/09/q-with-nine-great-programm...
Comment linking /2012/09/q-with-nine-great-programmers.html
on “Linus Torvalds, Visual Basic Fan (2006)”Submitted Which .NET ORM – Dapper or Entity Framework? as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
