Top all-time · #2339
SoftwareMill
Company blog · softwaremill.comprogrammingbusiness
SoftwareMill is the company blog at softwaremill.com, writing about programming and business. Since 2013, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 71 times, most often “Evaluating persistent, replicated message queues (RabbitMQ/ActiveMQ/Kafka/SQS)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link SoftwareMill's engineering articles on messaging and distributed systems, including its message queue benchmarks (mqperf), plus posts on Scala, Git, and microservice patterns.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Custom software solutions: web applications, backend systems & enterprise applications. Scala, Java, Big Data, Machine Learning, Blockchain.
Most-linked posts?
- Evaluating persistent, replicated message queues (RabbitMQ/ActiveMQ/Kafka/SQS)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-05-05
- Comparing Akka-Stream and Scalaz-Stream with Code Examples3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-05-28
- Stack Overflow’s mishap with self-reported data – tabs-vs-spaces debacle2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-17
- /understanding-capture-checking-in-scala/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-12-08
- Kafka with selective acknowledgments performance and latency benchmark2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-26
- Visibility Shift In Distributed Teams2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-10-04
- Amazon SQS: performance and latency2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-17
What Hacker News says?
I have looked at elasticmq but not played with it myself. You might also be interested in their benchmarks of all of the existing queues out there: https://softwaremill.com/mqperf/
Comment linking /mqperf/
on “Show HN: Drop-in SQS replacement based on SQLite”Submitted Hiring Developers in a Remote and Distributed Company as a story · 56 points
HN discussionWhile I get how that's like git, it sounds even closer to unison: https://softwaremill.com/trying-out-unison-part-1-code-as-ha...
Comment linking /trying-out-unison-part-1-code-as-hashes/
on “20 years of Git”Submitted Apache Kafka vs. Apache Iggy: A Technical Comparision as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> But safety is not the only important aspect of a programming language. That's also part of what I've said. The point still being: Where you need a safe language there is no way around it, and Scala is still one of the very few options you have at all. Scala is in that regard indispensable. > I feel that Scala 3 really hurt the community angle I don't see that. Everything relevant, besides Spark, is now on Scala 3,…
Comment linking /understanding-capture-checking-in-scala/
on “Scala 3 slowed us down?”Submitted 20 CEOs in one company as a story · 12 points
HN discussionScala is broadly used by the biggest companies in existence. https://business4s.org/scala-adoption-tracker/ The stuff currently cooking in Scala 3 will once more revolutionize the whole programming language landscape. https://softwaremill.com/understanding-capture-checking-in-s... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-iWql7fVRg
Comment linking /understanding-capture-checking-in-scala/
on “Scala 3 slowed us down?”Submitted No managers in company – 3 ways of decision making as a story · 10 points
HN discussionIf that's true, you managed to do much better than these folks: https://softwaremill.com/mqperf/ Maybe you should write a letter?
Comment linking /mqperf/
on “Kafka at the low end: how bad can it get?”Submitted Event Sourcing on Blockchain with Ethereum, TypeScript and React as a story · 7 points
HN discussionCould you elaborate? It's a great writeup. But I'm personally curious about them hitting the limits of vertical scalability. They said they used the biggest node 'available to them' without clarifying how big that was. If the issue was RabbitMQ hitting resource limits then upgrading its hardware (or swapping it out for some other similarly featureful broker but which is faster) might have fixed some of the problems…
Comment linking /mqperf/
on “Eliminating Task Processing Outages by Replacing RabbitMQ with Apache Kafka”Submitted Reactive Kafka 0.8: at-least-once-delivery with manual offset commits as a story · 7 points
HN discussionEvery company is for profit. OpenAI was a “non-profit”. “Worse” and “good enough” can be true at the same time. Selfhosting signal is inferior to selfhosting matrix [0]. [0] https://softwaremill.com/can-you-self-host-the-signal-server...
Comment linking /can-you-self-host-the-signal-server/
on “Chat Control is already live on Facebook Messenger”Submitted iOS/Android iBeacon conference app – how we did it as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> Is java able to stackify most new Object calls and elide default initialization of object members these days? Escape analysis in OpenJDK will stack allocate values where it can show it is safe to do so. Project Valhalla is also reducing the memory footprint of objects. As for thread safety, that is more of a language concern than a runtime one. Amongst JVM languages Scala is leading here AFAIK. Its "capture checki…
Comment linking /understanding-capture-checking-in-scala/
on “JDK 27 G1/Parallel/Serial GC Changes”Submitted Interactive programming with Hydrogen, Atom, Python: instant feedback as a story · 6 points
HN discussionYes indeed. Attaching below a couple of references from my exploration: Transactional outbox pattern: - https://microservices.io/patterns/data/transactional-outbox.... - https://softwaremill.com/microservices-101 - https://brandur.org/job-drain A pattern similar to the one I mention using cache: - https://masstransit-project.com/articles/outbox.html
Comment linking /microservices-101
on “Ask HN: What are best patterns for events in distributed transactions?”Submitted Access Control System with Raspberry Pi, RFiD and AWS Rekognition as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> Git sucks. Reason? It is entirely imperative. A git repository is a persistent data structure [1]. Operations are typically append-only, requiring --force flags to do any in-place mutation. > And, well, just like in C, there's no safety pillow - if you screw up a call, something simply goes pear-shaped. Git is the safety pillow. When you screw up your code, you restore it with git. Article doesn't mention the refl…
Comment linking /persistent-data-structures-in-functional-programming/
on “Isn't It Obvious That C Programmers Wrote Git?”Submitted Comparing Akka-Stream and Scalaz-Stream with Code Examples as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIt seems that you are mainly interested in how to build preview environments for your app, these posts describe an approach to get there: - https://softwaremill.com/preview-environment-for-code-review... - https://softwaremill.com/preview-environment-for-code-review... - https://softwaremill.com/preview-environment-for-code-review... While the examples use Gitlab, it shouldn't be very hard to port the same idea to a…
Comment linking /preview-environment-for-code-reviews-part-3-reverse-proxy-configuration/
on “Ask HN: What is the best source to learn Docker in 2023?”Submitted Introducing sttp as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stack Overflow’s mishap with self-reported data – tabs-vs-spaces debacle as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Entry-level, synchronous and transactional event sourcing as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tools for Remote and Distributed Retrospectives as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Scala has to offer for Java devs as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Kafka with selective acknowledgments performance and latency benchmark as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Road to a more functional Java with Javaslang: example refactoring as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using Kafka as a Message Queue as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted 3DP Raspberry Pi iBeacon voting machines for Confitura 2014 as a story · 4 points
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