Top all-time · #3695
Mathias Verraes
Personal blog · verraes.netprogrammingdesign
Mathias Verraes's personal blog at verraes.net covers programming and design. Since 2014, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “The Wall of Technical Debt”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mathias Verraes's essays on DRY ("DRY is about knowledge"), Erlang's "Let It Crash", and Domain-Driven Design in practice, which commenters cite on those topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Mathias Verraes' blog
Most-linked posts?
- The Wall of Technical Debt4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-23
- DRY Is about Knowledge4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-04-14
- Higher Order Programming in PHP2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-26
What Hacker News says?
I was going to say you were talking nonsense, but then realized I’d replaced the original post in my mind, by this much nicer post that someone else linked in this thread: https://verraes.net/2014/08/dry-is-about-knowledge/ They essentially say the same thing, but one is better than the other.
Comment linking /2014/08/dry-is-about-knowledge/
on “Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely”Submitted Domain-Driven Design as a story · 247 points
HN discussionCouldn't agree more. There's a great decade-old blog post by Mathias Verraes which illustrates this well, I keep coming back to it: https://verraes.net/2014/08/dry-is-about-knowledge/
Comment linking /2014/08/dry-is-about-knowledge/
on “Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely”Submitted Higher Order Programming in PHP as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYes, after a few years of Java we all end up there. Frankly it's a good argument for the Erlang "Let It Crash" philosophy. https://verraes.net/2014/12/erlang-let-it-crash/ If IOException on a read is truly happening, and it isn't just a case of a missing file, there are serious issues that aren't going to be fixed with a catch-and-log, or be able to be handled further up the call stack.
Comment linking /2014/12/erlang-let-it-crash/
on “The Next Step for Generics”Submitted Patterns in Distributed Systems as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSome good resources about DRY: > DRY is about knowledge. Code duplication is not the issue. https://verraes.net/2014/08/dry-is-about-knowledge/ > Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system https://wiki.c2.com/?DontRepeatYourself
Comment linking /2014/08/dry-is-about-knowledge/
on “Essays on programming I think about a lot”Submitted What Is Domain-Driven Design (DDD) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe definition is highly summarised, which (like many definitions) makes it only useful if you already understand the concept, and you need a way to remember it. Or the definition can be a framework for explaining it to others, which is how I use it in workshops. A more real world story of DDD in practice is this blog post: https://verraes.net/2021/09/design-and-reality/
Comment linking /2021/09/design-and-reality/
on “Domain-Driven Design”Submitted The Wall of Technical Debt as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Patterns for Decoupling in Distributed Systems: Summary Event as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Higher order programming as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Domains and Bounded Contexts Don't Map 1 on 1 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A good collection of Messaging Patterns as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Wall of Technical Debt as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Wall of Technical Debt as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Wall of Technical Debt as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Patterns for Decoupling in Distributed Systems: Domain Query as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Practical Event Sourcing (2014) [video] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pre-merge Code Reviews as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Software design is just theory as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Small controlled experiments: continuous improvement in a software team as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Critically Engaging with Models as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted DRY Is about Knowledge as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Managed Technical Debt [2013] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Domain-Driven Design is Linguistic as a story · 1 points
HN discussion