Top all-time · #2560
Dorian Taylor
Personal blog · doriantaylor.com · on HN as dorianprogrammingculture
Dorian Taylor writes Make Things. Make Sense., a personal blog at doriantaylor.com about programming and culture. Since 2011, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Agile as Trauma”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-03-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for essays on software development, such as the analogy of software to movie production, the single-page-app 'morality play' and the causes of slow software builds. Also cited on systems design and footnotes.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Agile as Trauma6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-02-11
- The Great Deshittification2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-24
- Google’s Long March2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-10
- HTTP URL Path Parameter Syntax2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-21
- Software's Ailing Mythology (2015)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-27
What Hacker News says?
This intrigued me: > Don’t even get me started about URL parameters. No, not querystrings – there was originally a specification where you could do something like “/key1:value1/key2:value2/” to pass data into a request. I couldn't find a specification, but I did find [1] which led to [2], both of which indicate that there's an idea of parameters within the URL hierarchy itself. It seems to me that it could be useful…
Comment linking /policy/http-url-path-parameter-syntax
on “We have broken HTTP”Submitted Agile as Trauma as a story · 56 points
HN discussionI really like Dorian Taylor's analogy of software to movie production: https://doriantaylor.com/softwares-ailing-mythology Their point is that software is a refinement of a process to the point where it can be executed by a computer (in a generally bug-free manner). Just like a movie spends a lot of time in pre-production and writing the script, we must spend a lot of time on refining our own understanding of our pr…
Comment linking /softwares-ailing-mythology
on “Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)”Submitted Agile as Trauma as a story · 51 points
HN discussionI really like the virtue/vice discussion framing this. You don't see virtue-oriented discussion of topics very often unless it's the accusation of "virtue signalling" being flung around. > I keep seeing Single-Page-Apps with huge JS files that only, in terms of concrete User Experience (UX) benefits, deliver client-side validation of forms plus analytics. Apps rarely leverage the potential of a Single-Page-App. It’s…
Comment linking /agile-as-trauma
on “The Single-Page-App Morality Play”Submitted Toward a Theory of Design as Computation as a story · 45 points
HN discussionThis article is blowing my mind, as is the linked article "Agile as Trauma"[1], written by apparently a different author but with a very similar broad perspective. I want to read more like this. [1] https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma [update: holy cow, this one too https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/software-crisis-2/ Today is turning into "read about existential problems with how software is developed" day…
Comment linking /agile-as-trauma
on “The Single-Page-App Morality Play”Submitted Why we should adopt a non-Turing complete language for client-side scripting as a story · 29 points
HN discussionTo me, Christopher Alexander's work comes closest to describing "systems science". I recommend Notes on the Synthesis of Form , The Timeless Way of Building , and then skipping to the Nature of Order series. I'm of the opinion right now that what we call "design" and "architecture" is really just the science of finding stable habitable zones in high-dimensional problem spaces. What's cool about Alexander's work is t…
Comment linking /
on “We must seek a widely-applicable science of systems”Submitted The Specificity Gradient as a story · 12 points
HN discussionoh yeah ps the specificity gradient ( https://youtu.be/dDE_y7Qri9w which I recorded much later) is stewart brand/frank duffy "shearing layers"/"pace layers" stuff; see https://doriantaylor.com/shearing-layers-applied-to-the-web
Comment linking /shearing-layers-applied-to-the-web
on “Agile as Trauma”Submitted Lowering the Risk of Web Development as a story · 7 points
HN discussionFor footnotes/sidenotes/endnotes, I think about a few implementations: - Dorian's expandable parentheticals (click on the gray phrases): https://doriantaylor.com/person/dorian-taylor#me - Gwern's list of sidenote implementations: https://gwern.net/sidenote - The ellipsis -> bottom modal pattern, found on buttondown articles like this one: https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/you-can-cheat-a-t... These days, I…
Comment linking /person/dorian-taylor
on “Give footnotes the boot – alternatives to footnotes on the web”Submitted The Isomorphism Shuffle as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Google’s Long March as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Betamaxed as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The 3-Ladder System of Social Class in the U.S. [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Agile as Trauma as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Agile as Trauma as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Great Deshittification as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Software's Ailing Mythology (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Google's Long March as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Only Argument You Will Ever Need Against PHP as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A geek is a person without a compass as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The purpose of business is profit? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Great Deshittification as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Specificity Gradient as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Symbol Management Problem as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted HTTP URL Path Parameter Syntax as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Working Titles get Random Cryptonyms (2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
