Top all-time · #2916
Steve Francia
Personal blog · spf13.com · on HN as spf13programmingweb
Steve Francia writes spf13, a personal blog at spf13.com about programming and web. Since 2010, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Steve Francia's blog for posts on Go tooling, gofmt, and Hugo release news, plus essays on programming languages and leadership. Commenters mostly cite individual posts as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Steve Francia, technologist
Most-linked posts?
- /presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-03
- Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-03
- Hugo: A Fast And Flexible Static Site Generator Built In GoLang2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-08-05
- The Maintainers Dilemma2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-21
- Why TypeScript 7.0 Was Rewritten in Go2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-07
- Hugo SSG v0.17 released (2x speed and multilingual)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-07
- I’m joining the Go team at Google – spf13.com2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-17
- Is Go an Object Oriented Language?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-17
What Hacker News says?
Not as nice is a pretty big understatement. Here's the article that Mozilla links to about how to do it on OSX: http://spf13.com/post/managing-multiple-firefox-profiles-in-... /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin --profilemanager
Comment linking /post/managing-multiple-firefox-profiles-in-os-x/
on “Container Tabs”Submitted I’m joining the Go team at Google as a story · 245 points
HN discussionRefactoring is a bit more advance than just renaming though. gofmt can transform one pattern to another. https://spf13.com/post/go-fmt/
Comment linking /post/go-fmt/
on “Go's Tooling Is an Undervalued Technology”Submitted Spf13 is leaving Google as a story · 239 points
HN discussionSteve Francia has written a nice blog article about the recent Hugo 0.17 release: http://spf13.com/post/hugo-goes-global/
Comment linking /post/hugo-goes-global/
on “Hugo: A fast and modern static website engine”Submitted Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages as a story · 164 points
HN discussionThis article bears directly on my point: Why Engineers Can't Be Rational About Programming Languages Steve Francia 3 Nov 2025 The Leadership Blindspot: How Identity Drives Multi-Million Dollar Technical Debt https://spf13.com/p/the-hidden-conversation/
Comment linking /p/the-hidden-conversation/
on “Notes by djb on using Fil-C”Submitted Hugo: A Fast And Flexible Static Site Generator Built In GoLang as a story · 99 points
HN discussionWhile I appreciate that this is a work in progress and meant for learning, i just want to caution readers and those new to Go that this is a somewhat dangerous way to approach Go. Simply mapping familiar vocabulary from an traditional OO language into Go implies that the differences are superficial and the underlying concepts are largely the same. The truth is that a lot of the traditional vocabulary was very intent…
Comment linking /post/is-go-object-oriented/
on “Golang concepts from an OOP point of view”Submitted Refactoring with go fmt as a story · 86 points
HN discussionhttps://spf13.com/presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/
Comment linking /presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/
on “50 Years of Pascal and Delphi Is in Power”Submitted Is Go an Object-Oriented Language? as a story · 73 points
HN discussionhttps://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ https://spf13.com/presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/ https://seh.dev/go-legacy/
Comment linking /presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/
on “Inferno: A small operating system for building crossplatform distributed systems”Submitted Hugo SSG v0.17 released (2x speed and multilingual) as a story · 28 points
HN discussionAlso worth mentioning is Hugo, a static site generator: http://spf13.com/project/hugo
Comment linking /project/hugo
on “On Go’s Web Application Ecosystem”Submitted Nitro: A Quick And Simple Profiler For Golang as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSteve Francia (author of Hugo and a bunch of other top Go projects) wrote up some thoughts of Go's fit in the agentic era: https://spf13.com/p/go-the-agentic-language/
Comment linking /p/go-the-agentic-language/
on “TypeScript 7”Submitted The 9 Cost Factors as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why TypeScript 7.0 Was Rewritten in Go as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Benjamin Franklin Invented Machine Learning in 1720 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Software Developments Magic Triangle as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Zelda on a Conference Badge as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Is Go an Object Oriented Language? as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Maintainers Dilemma as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hybrid MongoDB / SQL Applications as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pointers vs. References as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted SOAP vs. REST as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Be a Good Open Source Community Member as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted 7 Common Mistakes in Go (presentation Slides) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A modern CLI Commander for Go as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
