Top all-time · #825
Julien Danjou
Personal blog · julien.danjou.infoprogrammingstartupswriting
Julien Danjou writes jd:/dev/blog, a personal blog at julien.danjou.info about programming, startups and writing. Since 2010, 81 different Hacker News readers have linked it 95 times, most often “Rant about Github pull-request workflow implementation”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Julien Danjou's blog as a source on Python profiling, Emacs, and X11/Awesome WM internals, and one commenter lists him among developers they follow closely.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter says they like the blog even though it writes more about Emacs than their own VIM interests.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Two decades of building software, shipping startups, and open source. Opinions included.
Most-linked posts?
- Rant about Github pull-request workflow implementation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-05-10
- Emacs rainbow-mode3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-06-29
- Profiling Python using cProfile: a concrete case3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-11-16
- High-Performance in Python with Zero-Copy and the Buffer Protocol3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-01-28
- Bad practices in FLOSS project management2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-09
- Python bad practice, a concrete case2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-09-15
- Dependencies Handling in Python2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-03
- Twenty Years of Stacking Commits2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-05
- /blog/2011/why-not-lua2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-09-30
- Rant about GitHub pull-request workflow implementation (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-25
What Hacker News says?
Daily, none, but I have some on my RSS reader; besides the ones already posted: http://julien.danjou.info/blog/index.html ← Julien Danjou, Awesome WM main (only?) dev. http://ejohn.org/ ← John Resig, jQuery creator and lead dev http://codeutopia.net/blog/
Comment linking /blog/index.html
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Google Weather for Emacs as a story · 85 points
HN discussionDavid Beazley : http://www.dabeaz.com/ Kenneth Reitz : https://www.kennethreitz.org/ Armin Ronacher : http://lucumr.pocoo.org/ Julien Danjou : https://julien.danjou.info/ Hynek Schlawack : https://hynek.me/ Donald Stufft : https://caremad.io/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted Why not Lua as a story · 82 points
HN discussionI'm working with some researches on about ~40k lines of Python disease modelling code and these are the things that helped us becomes more productive: - tests (unit, smoke, acceptance) (eg. https://mattsegal.dev/alternate-test-styles.html , https://understandlegacycode.com/approval-tests/ ) - continuous integration (via GitHub actions eg: https://mattsegal.dev/pytest-on-github-actions.html ) - 10x performance improv…
Comment linking /guide-to-python-profiling-cprofile-concrete-case-carbonara/
on “Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language”Submitted Emacs gets Google Maps support. as a story · 80 points
HN discussionYou may be interested in git-annex. http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011.html#Handling_my_music_c...
Comment linking /blog/2011.html
on “AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers”Submitted Packaging Python software with pbr as a story · 53 points
HN discussiongit annex might be of interest to some: http://git-annex.branchable.com/ http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011.html#Handling_my_music_c...
Comment linking /blog/2011.html
on “AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers”Submitted There's Almost No Gitlab as a story · 38 points
HN discussionhttp://askubuntu.com/a/11877/19466 : X has two drawing APIs. One of these is a part of the core X11 protocol, which is ancient, useless, and nobody uses. The other is the XRender extension which provides modern composite operations, among other things such as gradients. This is what Cairo, for example, uses. X also has font drawing APIs. http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on... : The X11 proto…
Comment linking /blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on-the-X-protocol
on “Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir”Submitted Thoughts and rambling on the X protocol as a story · 9 points
HN discussionWell, I've been enjoying Joey Hess' build log of git-annex assistant [1], and I like Julien Danjou's [2] too, even though he writes more about Emacs, while I'm a VIM user. Then there's Old New Thing, LtU and John Resig's blog, but those are less obscure. [1]: http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/ [2]: http://julien.danjou.info/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What unknown technical blogs or sites do you read?”Submitted Rant about Github pull-request workflow implementation as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHere's a good explanation of this technique: http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2013/python-3.4-single-dispat...
Comment linking /blog/2013/python-3.4-single-dispatch-generic-function
on “Python 3.4.0 released”Submitted Why not Lua as a story · 7 points
HN discussionFor a different perspective, take a look at http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011/why-not-lua (submitted to HN as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536131 ).
Comment linking /blog/2011/why-not-lua
on “Why Lua?”Submitted The definitive guide on how to use static, class or abstract methods in Python as a story · 6 points
HN discussionGoing pretty far off topic here, but you might enjoy rainbow-mode: http://julien.danjou.info/software/rainbow-mode as a partial alternative (although it's more a preview than a picker)
Comment linking /software/rainbow-mode
on “After 7.5 years, Firefox finally adds line numbers to view-source:”Submitted Fixing Alembic's Multiple Heads Problem with Git as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWhat is your one-size-fits-all-possible-use-cases scripting language they should all use instead? Lua? Counterpoint: https://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011/why-not-lua Any scripting language will have issues. It is far easier to reason about and deal with issues created by your own DSL than some other 3rd party language that you have minimal or no control over.
Comment linking /blog/2011/why-not-lua
on “Godot game engine reaches 2.0”Submitted Debugging C Code on macOS as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWell, Emacs is very much "a day to learn, a lifetime to master". I've been using it for years, have led sessions teaching other developers, and just yesterday I discovered rainbow-mode ( http://julien.danjou.info/rainbow-mode.html ). Before that, it was magit and halp.
Comment linking /rainbow-mode.html
on “Concepts The Emacs Newbie Should Master”Submitted How awesome ended up with Lua and not Guile – Julien Danjou [pdf] as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYes, the pre-commit workflow is also why I won't use it. I want to review branches, not patches. With branches though, there's another problem which AFAIK no code review tool can manage, with the sole exception of Gerrit: force pushes. While you might recoil, I think force pushes are often an entirely reasonable thing to do on a feature branch which is not yet merged into mainline, especially when cosmetic stuff get…
Comment linking /blog/2013/rant-about-github-pull-request-workflow-implementation
on “Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform”Submitted Scaling Python: A book about the performance of applications written in Python as a story · 5 points
HN discussion"doing this in the terminal requires a crazy number of steps" "Switching contexts from your browser into your terminal." "you can simply make the change right there without leaving your browser, saving you time and maintaining your zen-like frame of mind" Sending a pull request for a typo in someone else's project is way faster using the github web editor, no question, but for everything else? I'm in a terminal or,…
Comment linking /blog/2013/rant-about-github-pull-request-workflow-implementation
on “GitHub Flow in the Browser”Submitted Porting D-Bus to XCB: story of a failure as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYes, there is a difference between embedding and extending. Extending means your app is just a module that lives in the language's interpreter. Embedding means the language interpreter lives in your app. One advocate[-1] of extending prefers it simply because he got bitten by his own poor design. Another advocate[undefined] prefers it simply because he prefers JavaScript and the easiest way to embed it is to write y…
Comment linking /blog/2011/why-not-lua
on “Scriptable Operating Systems with Lua [pdf]”Submitted Thoughts and rambling on the X protocol as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
