Top all-time · #1561
SmartBear Blog
Company blog · smartbear.com/blogprogrammingweb
SmartBear Blog is the company blog at smartbear.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2011, 45 different Hacker News readers have linked it 63 times, most often “Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer (2011)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link SmartBear's blog mainly for its profile of Fabrice Bellard (creator of FFmpeg, QEMU and TCC) and for code review articles. Many links cite it as a source or reference.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Maintain control as development accelerates. Enforce application integrity with AI-powered testing and API quality across the SDLC.
Most-linked posts?
- Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer (2011)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-02-15
- Best Practices for Code Review4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-08-13
- /blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-07-23
What Hacker News says?
I'm not sure if the other debug tools mentioned offer this, but AQTime Pro: https://smartbear.com/product/aqtime-pro/overview/ has an allocation profiler that can be used to track down this sort of problem. You can take allocation snapshots while the application is running to see where the allocations are coming from (provided that you can run AQTime Pro against a binary with debug symbols/info). I'm not affiliated…
Comment linking /product/aqtime-pro/overview/
on “The Horror in the Standard Library”Submitted Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer (2011) as a story · 114 points
HN discussionWow. I had no idea that both ffmpeg and qemu was two of the things Bellard created. https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-...
Comment linking /blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/
on “ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable”Submitted When bad software requirements happen to good people (2011) as a story · 47 points
HN discussionFound this article that seems to talk more about him than his own website. https://smartbear.com/blog/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-sup... "Bellard doesn’t appear to promote himself—he politely declined to be interviewed for this profile"
Comment linking /blog/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/
on “Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler”Submitted SmartBear Launches Open API Initiative with Key Industry Leaders (Google,IBM,MS) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionLooks like this was eaten by link rot. You can find it here: https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-...
Comment linking /blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/
on “BPG Image format”Submitted Forty Years of Unix, and 'The Scariest Thing I’ve Ever Done' (2013) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMore info about Fabrice: https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-...
Comment linking /blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/
on “Tiny C Compiler”Submitted Best Practices for Code Review as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSmatbear has a great article on code reviews https://smartbear.com/blog/avoiding-the-politics-of-code-rev... He has the following suggestions: - "Ensure that reviews are two-way. Never have people who only review and people who only get reviewed." - "Always focus on the code and not the person who wrote the code." - "Make the reviews small, frequent, and informal. Marathon group sessions in rooms make people defensi…
Comment linking /blog/avoiding-the-politics-of-code-review/
on “Ask HN: What tone to use in code review suggestions?”Submitted Can anyone design a job application platform that doesn't suck? (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI keep a running list of articles I found useful over the years. There are many great articles about Code Reviews out there. Consider this a more general answer to your question: Feedback Ladders: How We Encode Code Reviews at Net-lify https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/03/05/feedback-ladders-how... How to Make Good Code Reviews Better https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/30/how-to-make-good-code-... Best Practices for…
Comment linking /learn/code-review/best-practices-for-peer-code-review/
on “Ask HN: What tone to use in code review suggestions?”Submitted The Developer’s RegEx Survival Guide (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI cannot watch this entire video, so it is possible that you explain conceptually how your acceptance tests are different from end to end test? I would like to undestand what were the goals of your initial end to end and what are the goals of acceptance testing, and how you define these acceptance testing from test objective perspective. I assume end to end tests could be described by this definition: "test the func…
Comment linking /solutions/end-to-end-testing/
on “We killed our end-to-end test suite”Submitted The Standards Wars and the Sausage Factory (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBugsnag (SmartBear) | Android SDK Engineer | Full time | Onsite (Bath, UK) or Remote (UK) | https://bugsnag.com/ Cross platform crash-reporting and application stability dashboard. We're looking for an experienced Android engineer to join our open source team and help maintain our Android SDKs - used by engineering teams worldwide including some of the biggest names in tech. Work with a team of diversely-skilled eng…
Comment linking /company/careers/job-post/?gh_jid=4901125003
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2022)”Submitted Silly Programming Challenges to Do for Fun as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFabrice Bellard is just freaklishy smart and productive. It must be interesting to read more about him. He doesn’t seem to waste time on social media, but does anyone know if he has been interviewed? A quick search only showed this https://smartbear.com/blog/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-sup...
Comment linking /blog/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/
on “Textsynth: Bellard's free GPT-NeoX-20B, GPT-J playground and paid API”Submitted Best Practices for Code Review as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> "In general, pull request culture is not about code review." Companies/organizations have different requirements for code reviews. Yes you can review code in pull requests, but in my opinion, it was not built for code reviews. In my previous company, we had a very rigorous code review process, which includes pre and post commit code reviews. We used Collaborator[1] and ReviewBoard[2] for code reviews and I totally…
Comment linking /product/collaborator/overview/
on “The State of Go”Submitted Things Developers Wished Their Bosses Knew About Code Review as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSmartBear has their own set of best practices and they recommend about 300-400 loc per hour[1]. I think that's probably about right. It's something I think I've gotten faster at over time, partially because we're improving from previous reviews and partially because it's a skill that develops. [1]: http://smartbear.com/smartbear/media/pdfs/wp-cc-11-best-prac...
Comment linking /smartbear/media/pdfs/wp-cc-11-best-practices-of-peer-code-review.pdf
on “Code Review Best Practices”Submitted 3 day webinar series on API strategies as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> this evidence has been around for ages Evidence of what? This is not a study of software development at all, but of prototyping using a program with no more than a few hundred lines. I'm talking about effects on software development. The issue of prototyping/tiny programs is a completely separate one. > Substantiate that I don't know how I can substantiate the lack of evidence, but here's a recent failed attempt t…
Comment linking /SmartBear/media/pdfs/Best-Kept-Secrets-of-Peer-Code-Review_Redirected.pdf
on “Storm 2.0”Submitted Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-... Some info here
Comment linking /blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/
on “Jslinux (2018)”Submitted What is Code Review? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionExcellent point. The code review tool in GitHub is a much worse than I was using in 2009, ten years ago! ( https://smartbear.com/product/collaborator/overview/ ) I haven't used Collaborator in a while, but I wonder how much it has improved in ten years. It sounds like you're thinking of a code review tool + CI/CD pipeline, right, @inglor? e.g., 1. suggest a change in the UI or backend in the code review tool 2. run…
Comment linking /product/collaborator/overview/
on “Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?”Submitted What Is Agile Testing? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
