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William Durand

Personal blog · williamdurand.frprogrammingcareer

William Durand's personal blog at williamdurand.fr covers programming and career. Since 2012, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “Please. Don't [REST] Patch Like An Idiot.”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-01, and you can follow it by feed.

Visit the blog
46mentions?
11HN people?
2012–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 16 in 2013

Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?

Why HN links it

William Durand's blog covers software engineering practice: a Git branching model, the 'rule of six' for cleaner code, and REST and PATCH semantics. HN readers cite it for these topics.

Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.

Hi! I’m Will. Lifelong learner. OSS evangelist. (Traveler.) Cyclist. (Runner.) (Speaker.) Firefox dev. He/him.

Most-linked posts?

  1. Please. Don't [REST] Patch Like An Idiot.
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-02-14
  2. /2013/06/03/object-calisthenics/
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-06
  3. Unit testing C code with LD_PRELOAD
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-07

What Hacker News says?

  1. Reminded me of 'Object Calisthenics' by Jeff Bay. Basically an exercise for a toy project where you adhere to 9 rules: 1. Only One Level Of Indentation PerMethod 2. Don’t Use The ELSE Keyword 3. Wrap All Primitives And Strings 4. First Class Collections 5. One Dot Per Line 6. Don’t Abbreviate 7. Keep All Entities Small 8. No Classes With More Than Two InstanceVariables 9. No Getters/Setters/Properties https://willia…

    Comment linking /2013/06/03/object-calisthenics/

    on “Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six”
  2. Submitted On Open-Sourcing Libraries as a story · 73 points

    HN discussion
  3. drderidder · 2014-10-30Recommends
    Hmm, I got the impression that REST purists insist on using PATCH. Rails 4 uses it for their REST implementation, for example. Also check out Will Durand's post [1]. I mused about the relative merits of PATCH vs POST in a blog post [2] - if you have any references you wouldn't mind leaving in the comments, I'd love to check them out. PS. nesting resources is a pretty interesting issue in itself; there seem to be a f…

    Comment linking /2014/02/14/please-do-not-patch-like-an-idiot/

    on “JSON Patch – a format for describing changes to a JSON document”
  4. Submitted From STUPID to SOLID Code! as a story · 40 points

    HN discussion
  5. Yeah. I like that and the approach is outlined in this short guide I found: http://williamdurand.fr/2012/01/17/my-git-branching-model/ i.e. before merging a feature branch, always rebase it on the tip of the integration branch, then merge it in with --no-ff to record an explicit merge commit on the integration branch, even though a fast-forward is possible. This gets you the temporal straightforwardness of rebase wh…

    Comment linking /2012/01/17/my-git-branching-model/

    on “Git pull --rebase until it hurts”
  6. Submitted Standing Desk Do It Yourself (DIY) as a story · 36 points

    HN discussion
  7. I dealt with this a bunch. I think it’s a natural tendency of humans to hear a new idea and consider a simpler less nuanced version of it before they fully grasp it. As an example. I was taught about object-calisthenics[1] in school. The lecturer treated a straw man version of it, and I thought about this like that for a while. What’s worse, when I later thought it was a good exercise and explained it to others I no…

    Comment linking /2013/06/03/object-calisthenics/

    on “Mutation Driven Testing: When TDD Just Isn’t Good Enough”
  8. Submitted REST APIs with Symfony2: The Right Way as a story · 28 points

    HN discussion
  9. Submitted Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana with Docker as a story · 8 points

    HN discussion
  10. Submitted Patching Linux Kernel (Raspbian and CVE-2016-0728) as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  11. Submitted Teaching Is The Best Way To Learn as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  12. Submitted Unit testing C code with LD_PRELOAD as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  13. Submitted Unit testing C code with LD_PRELOAD as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  14. Submitted Rethinking My Life (On the Internets) as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  15. Submitted Rethinking My Life (On the Internets) as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  16. Submitted Please. Don't [REST] Patch Like An Idiot. as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  17. Submitted I Am A Sponge as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  18. Submitted Being A .NET Developer For A WeekEnd as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  19. Submitted Burnout as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  20. Submitted Being A Frontend Developer For A WeekEnd as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  21. Submitted Installing Vagrant In A Restricted Environment as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  22. Submitted Geocoder: The Missing PHP5 Library as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  23. Submitted Deep Dive into Containers as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  24. Submitted Developing Firefox in Firefox with Gitpod as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  25. Submitted Malware analysis writeup: Heodo (1/2) as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  26. Submitted Level Up as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  27. Submitted Configuring SSL/TLS with Hipache (And Node.js) as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  28. Submitted Object Calisthenics You Said? as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  29. Submitted Object Calisthenics as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  30. Submitted Being A Frontend Developer For A WeekEnd as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion

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