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The Reformed Programmer
Personal blog · thereformedprogrammer.netprogrammingcareer
The Reformed Programmer is a personal blog at thereformedprogrammer.net about programming and career. Since 2016, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times, most often “Dementia and Programming (Endnote) (2024)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-01-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog's posts on software practice: soft deletion versus ORM global filters, a checklist for Python library APIs, and how to plan for a NuGet package's author stepping away.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Dementia and Programming (Endnote) (2024)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-26
What Hacker News says?
This is one of those situations where a good ORM can simplify things greatly. For example, with EF Core you can add a global filter which will filter out soft-deleted rows in all queries automatically (unless you add .IgnoreQueryFilters()). It couples nicely with some hackery which turns removes into soft-deletes. You can remove objects as usual and they get soft-deleted in the database. I've used this in a few proj…
Comment linking /ef-core-in-depth-soft-deleting-data-with-global-query-filters/
on “Soft deletion probably isn't worth it”Submitted Dementia and Programming (Endnote) (2024) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionAuthor here. Thanks for the feedback. I wrote this because I've seen too many APIs I couldn't use or had to discard later on because they forgot to expose a lower-level parameter. Yes, supporting additional parameters is a trade-off on stability, but I think it boils down to separating things that change frequently from things that shouldn't change, i.e., having a low-level interface and a high-level interface on th…
Comment linking /what-makes-a-good-software-library/
on “Checklist for Python libraries APIs”Submitted What makes a good software library? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe problem of what happens when the author is unable to keep working on the source code has come up a LOT in the .NET space. One author (of both books and OSS) has even written up [0] the pro-active steps he's taken for when "The Emnuggerance" (as Pratchett called it) takes his abilities. [0] https://www.thereformedprogrammer.net/how-to-update-a-nuget-...
Comment linking /how-to-update-a-nuget-library-once-the-author-isnt-available/
on “Cold-Blooded Software”