Top all-time · #12362
Terry Crowley
Personal blog · terrycrowley.medium.comprogrammingsystems
Terry Crowley's personal blog at terrycrowley.medium.com covers programming and systems. Since 2022, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Anatomy of a Moderately Complex App”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Terry Crowley's essay on software ecology and bloat, which argues that feature growth tends to outpace efforts to improve performance and reduce footprint. Commenters cite it to explain why software gets slower.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Anatomy of a Moderately Complex App2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-15
- Never Write Your Own Database2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-27
What Hacker News says?
Also, RAM, CPU and disk space are shared resources on PCs. If your computer is slow you don't necessarily attribute it to any particular program, let alone website. As Terry Crowley says here https://terrycrowley.medium.com/software-ecology-bb4653046fd... "... the cost of bloat is not directly borne by the those introducing it. Individual efforts to reduce bloat have little effect since there is always another bad a…
Comment linking /software-ecology-bb4653046fda
on “Did we lose our way in making efficient software?”Submitted Small pleasures of programming (2020) as a story · 78 points
HN discussionI liked this post by Terry Crowley: https://terrycrowley.medium.com/software-ecology-bb4653046fd... "The classic response to accusations of bloat is that this growth is an efficient response to the additional resources available with improved hardware. That is, programmers are investing in adding features rather than investing in improving performance, disk footprint or other efforts to reduce bloat because the adde…
Comment linking /software-ecology-bb4653046fda
on “Did we lose our way in making efficient software?”Submitted Surprising Automata as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Never Write Your Own Database as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Anatomy of a Moderately Complex App as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Never Write Your Own Database (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Anatomy of a Moderately Complex App as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Inflationary Theory of Software Systems as a story · 1 points
HN discussion