Top all-time · #2610
Malte Ubl
Personal blog · industrialempathy.com/postswebprogrammingcareer
Malte Ubl writes Industrial Empathy, a personal blog at industrialempathy.com about web, programming and career. Since 2020, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “Design Docs at Google”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Malte Ubl's blog for its engineering-practice writing: the Google design docs guide, web font loading and performance, and version skew between deployments.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A website by Malte Ubl.
Most-linked posts?
- Design Docs at Google8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-07-06
- Version Skew6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-06-21
- More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web (2021)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-01-31
- Maximally optimizing image loading for the web in 20213 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-12-28
- Designing Even Larger Applications (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-23
- The Context Tree Design Pattern2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-23
- Organizations Are Distributed Systems2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-30
What Hacker News says?
Re: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-googl... > ... sketching out that API is usually a good idea. In most cases, however, one should withstand the temptation to copy-paste formal interface or data definitions into the doc as these are often verbose, contain unnecessary detail and quickly get out of date. Using R Markdown (or any Turing Complete documentation system), it's possible to introduce…
Comment linking /posts/design-docs-at-google
on “Writing a good design document”Submitted Design Docs at Google as a story · 459 points
HN discussionI used the following sources to create an RFC template (and promote the document culture across the engineering documentation): - https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-googl... - https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs - https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/... - https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/rfcs-and-design-docs/ Hint: tailor the process and template structure based on your or…
Comment linking /posts/design-docs-at-google/
on “Writing a good design document”Submitted Design docs at Google (2020) as a story · 345 points
HN discussionOP links to a design doc template that implements the ideas it lays out: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-doc-a-design-...
Comment linking /posts/design-doc-a-design-doc/
on “Design Docs at Google”Submitted More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web (2021) as a story · 127 points
HN discussion> it doesn't matter if you have a blog article recommending structured emails over video calls Exactly! Funny thing is that if you send these people an article explaining the benefits of written docs (design docs, RFCs, proposals, any text document documenting a decision), they will just simply not read it. I'm on a team where I believe we started gigantic refactoring and redesigning projects without being clear on…
Comment linking /posts/design-docs-at-google/
on “No, we won’t have a video call for that”Submitted Font loading on the web as a story · 48 points
HN discussionPerhaps read the section dedicated to this point: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-googl... Some cross-cutting concerns are about more than just code, but things like "how will you monitor this for reliability?" or "this system reads user-sensitive data, how will those reads be audited?" and so on. Usually the answer is short: "use standard system xyz" - but having it there and ensuring it's fo…
Comment linking /posts/design-docs-at-google/
on “Design docs at Google (2020)”Submitted Maximally optimizing image loading for the web in 2021 as a story · 10 points
HN discussionhttps://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/avif-webp-quality-se...
Comment linking /posts/avif-webp-quality-settings/
on “Squoosh: Make images smaller using best-in-class codecs, right in the browser”Submitted More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web (2021) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionUse font-display, people. Required reading, “More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web”: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/high-performance-web... Edit: > Developers need to use a system font stack which loads fonts from the system itself instead of remote web fonts IMO the takeaway is "self-host fonts, make sure they're small files, load early, and don't block render," not "only use nati…
Comment linking /posts/high-performance-web-font-loading/
on “Public CDNs Are Useless and Dangerous”Submitted 11 Years at Google as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPlease don’t inline a whole font to avoid a momentary flash. You’re worsening every page’s load to avoid a stutter on one. Here’s what is still the authority on this https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/high-performance-web...
Comment linking /posts/high-performance-web-font-loading/
on “Font-size-adjust Is Useful”Submitted A high-performance blog template for 11ty as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis was the site https://www.industrialempathy.com/ The source is open sourced but the Twitter part isn't included sadly.
Comment linking /
on “How the Jamstack is failing at comments”Submitted Viral Software Deadlines as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI got a lot of good information on writing design docs from here https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-googl... also if you just Google the 2 words "design docs" there's actually a surprising amount of useful things that pop up
Comment linking /posts/design-docs-at-google/
on “Ask HN: Examples of good technical design docs”Submitted Maximally optimizing image loading for the web in 2021 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's a lot of misunderstanding of what "frontend" and "backend" are: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/frontend-backend/
Comment linking /posts/frontend-backend/
on “Why I'm Using Next.js”Submitted Design Docs at Google as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is also a good primer on version skew: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/version-skew/ (written by CTO of Vercel)
Comment linking /posts/version-skew/
on “Vercel: Skew Protection”Submitted Design Docs at Google as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Version Skew as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Version Skew as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Design Docs at Google as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Organizations Are Distributed Systems as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Organizations Are Distributed Systems as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Malte Handbook as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
