Top all-time · #7131
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.
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?
- Please. Don't [REST] Patch Like An Idiot.3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-02-14
- /2013/06/03/object-calisthenics/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-06
- Unit testing C code with LD_PRELOAD2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-07
What Hacker News says?
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”Submitted On Open-Sourcing Libraries as a story · 73 points
HN discussionHmm, 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”Submitted From STUPID to SOLID Code! as a story · 40 points
HN discussionYeah. 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”Submitted Standing Desk Do It Yourself (DIY) as a story · 36 points
HN discussionI 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”Submitted REST APIs with Symfony2: The Right Way as a story · 28 points
HN discussionSubmitted Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana with Docker as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Patching Linux Kernel (Raspbian and CVE-2016-0728) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Teaching Is The Best Way To Learn as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Unit testing C code with LD_PRELOAD as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Unit testing C code with LD_PRELOAD as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rethinking My Life (On the Internets) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rethinking My Life (On the Internets) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Please. Don't [REST] Patch Like An Idiot. as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Am A Sponge as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Being A .NET Developer For A WeekEnd as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Burnout as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Being A Frontend Developer For A WeekEnd as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Installing Vagrant In A Restricted Environment as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Geocoder: The Missing PHP5 Library as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Deep Dive into Containers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Developing Firefox in Firefox with Gitpod as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Malware analysis writeup: Heodo (1/2) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Level Up as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Configuring SSL/TLS with Hipache (And Node.js) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Object Calisthenics You Said? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Object Calisthenics as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Being A Frontend Developer For A WeekEnd as a story · 2 points
HN discussion