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Paul Hammant
Personal blog · paulhammant.comprogramming
Paul Hammant's personal blog at paulhammant.com covers programming. Since 2011, 68 different Hacker News readers have linked it 99 times, most often “Interface Builder's Alternative Lisp Timeline (2013)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paul Hammant's blog as a reference for trunk-based development, branch by abstraction, strangler applications and cookie-cutter scaling, plus posts on monorepos and Smalltalk's ENVY tool.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Called "very informative" and "interesting" blogs; otherwise the posts are cited as sources or references.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Home
Most-linked posts?
- Interface Builder's Alternative Lisp Timeline (2013)7 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-02-26
- Cookie Cutter Scaling5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-08-13
- What is Trunk Based Development? - Paul Hammant's blog5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-04-15
- Smalltalk Envy5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-09-09
- It turns out we didn't need Dependency Injection containers after all3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-04-18
- Google's vs. Facebook's Trunk Based Development3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-01-10
- Legacy Application Strangulation: Case Studies (2013)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-09-05
- /2013/12/04/what_is_your_branching_model/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-01-10
- Legacy Application Strangulation: Case Studies (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-10
- So you think monolith is the only alternative to microservices?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-06
What Hacker News says?
That book is new to me. I wrote https://paulhammant.com/2013/05/07/android-and-the-art-of-wa... on Google vs MSFT and phones before the book. Mine's a perspective that doesn't mention Nokia or its leadership. I did own a Treo and loved it up to the OG iPhone - I repaired the eff out of it in the hope that something worthy would come along. I kidded myself I would write apps for it. I'd previously played with Simbian…
Comment linking /2013/05/07/android-and-the-art-of-war
on “What we talk about when we talk about sideloading”Submitted Interface Builder's Alternative Lisp Timeline (2013) as a story · 125 points
HN discussionAh, haven't heard of that, I was just a wee lad at the University computing center before I got out of high school. This what you're referring to? https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/
Comment linking /2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/
on “Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth”Submitted Smalltalk Envy as a story · 117 points
HN discussionYou'll have to remember that all of those big companies have their tools and processes customized for their scale. Example: Instead of branching you would just create a `changelist` (a commit, a set of changes to files) and work on that. You can show it to your colleagues. You can build and test it. You can send the id to anyone to have a look at it, or test it themselves. You can have multiple changelists depending…
Comment linking /2014/01/08/googles-vs-facebooks-trunk-based-development/
on “Software Engineering at Google (2017)”Submitted Google's vs. Facebook's Trunk Based Development as a story · 96 points
HN discussionI think emphasizing Servo is the wrong goal. Ideally, when rewriting a large legacy app you want to take the StranglerApplication[1] approach. Netscape tried rewriting its software from scratch and we all know how that ended for Netscape[2] - Netscape is no more. Luckily, Firefox came from that whole mess. But I assume a lot of effort was lost, going from Netscape to Firefox. In idealized scenario, Servo slowly star…
Comment linking /2013/07/14/legacy-application-strangulation-case-studies/
on “A Quantum Leap for the Web”Submitted The Origins of Trunk Based Development as a story · 35 points
HN discussionRights of passage in sw-dev and IT is to propose a solution or re-implement something like many before you. Mine on email SPAM: https://paulhammant.com/blog/did-you-send-this
Comment linking /blog/did-you-send-this
on “Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else”Submitted Microsoft's Trunk Based Development as a story · 11 points
HN discussionAnd original Interface builder was developed in Lisp :) [1] [1] https://paulhammant.com/2013/03/28/interface-builders-altern...
Comment linking /2013/03/28/interface-builders-alternative-lisp-timeline/
on “What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?”Submitted Client-Side MVC frameworks compared as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> Incremental rewrites You keep using this term and I don't think you know what it means. The Strangler pattern IS an incremental rewrite. You've suggested that it's possible to introduce incremental rewrites to old code and all I was clarifying is that by refactoring code written in an old framework (e.g. PHP 5.6) does nothing to eliminate technical debt (adds to it, in fact). The Strangler pattern is most often us…
Comment linking /2013/07/14/legacy-application-strangulation-case-studies/
on “Avoid rewriting a legacy system from scratch by strangling it”Submitted Interface Builder's alternative Lisp timeline as a story · 5 points
HN discussionEx* Employee #500 here. All reinvested. * https://paulhammant.com/2015/01/06/farewell-2014-farewell-th...
Comment linking /2015/01/06/farewell-2014-farewell-thoughtworks/
on “ThoughtWorks has been sold to private equity”Submitted Interface Builder's alternative Lisp timeline as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'd take a stronger line than this. Microservice architectures scale worse than monoliths. Because with a monolith, you can just do this: http://paulhammant.com/2011/11/29/cookie-cutter-scaling/ Moreover, unless you're doing something intrinsically computationally expensive (video transcoding or whatever), or you've screwed up, your bottleneck will be in the database anyway. Scaling the database looks exactly the sa…
Comment linking /2011/11/29/cookie-cutter-scaling/
on “The microservices cargo cult”Submitted Interface Builder's Alternative Lisp Timeline as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSomebody has never used ENVY[0]. [0]: https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/
Comment linking /2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/
on “Pharo 14”Submitted Cookie Cutter Scaling as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI just used Mermaid for multiple sequence diagrams from build-steps sequences in a video talk I did on comparing build systems - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L67ri_xe2oQ (slides - https://paulhammant.com/google-style-dag-build-systems/ ). The new boost for me was GPT4o. It was able to quickly make what I wanted from the build logs alone, though it took some hand tweaking too. A new (or very old) problem after tha…
Comment linking /google-style-dag-build-systems/
on “Mermaid: Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text”Submitted Wikis that use source-control for their backing store (2017) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://paulhammant.com/categories.html#trunk_based_developme...
Comment linking /categories.html
on “Facebook's git repo is 54GB”Submitted Interface Builder's Alternative Lisp Timeline (2013) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've been griping about html's select for some tome - https://paulhammant.com/2013/01/31/appdev-glass-ceiling-revi... - great news
Comment linking /2013/01/31/appdev-glass-ceiling-revisited/
on “Customizable HTML Select”Submitted It is time for a new take on Spreadsheets as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> "Branch by Abstraction (instead of Branch by Source Control)" ( http://paulhammant.com/ ) In the beginning, we avoided copying when we experimented by using flags; then we used source control branches to make diff "copies". In the end, we just copied.
Comment linking /
on “Carmack: Parallel Implementations”Submitted UI Component Testing Revisited: Modern Implementation with Visual Verification as a story · 2 points
HN discussionfurther monorepo reading: Paul Hammant also likes to write about this and related subjects. https://paulhammant.com/categories.html#Monorepos
Comment linking /categories.html
on “Supercharging the Git Commit Graph IV: Bloom Filters”Submitted It turns out we didn't need Dependency Injection containers after all as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
