Top all-time · #2047
Redowan Delowar
Personal blog · rednafi.com · on HN as rednafiprogrammingcareer
Redowan Delowar writes Redowan's Reflections, a personal blog at rednafi.com about programming and career. Since 2023, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 143 times, most often “Dotfile Stewardship for the Indolent”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Redowan Delowar's blog for a post on splintered failure modes, a software engineering topic. One commenter praised that post as well written and easy to remember after one read.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- Well written; one read was enough for the commenter to remember it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software engineering blog by Redowan Delowar covering platform engineering, backend systems, distributed systems, reliability, databases, Go, Python, TypeScript, and pragmatic engineering practice.
Most-linked posts?
- Dotfile Stewardship for the Indolent3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-12-02
- Banish state-mutating methods from data classes3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-12-16
- Reminiscing CGI Scripts3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-12-26
- Einstellung Effect2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-24
- Dysfunctional Options Pattern in Go2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-06
- Strategy Pattern in Go2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-17
- Splintered Failure Modes in Go2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-01
- Statically enforcing frozen data classes in Python2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-05
- Diminishing Half Life of Knowledge2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-05
- A Tour of Txtar2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-10
What Hacker News says?
My most important microfeature is center-aligned pages. Whenever I read something on a large screen and the content is left-aligned, leaving a large gap on the right, it really turns me off. I try to make [mine]( https://rednafi.com ) center aligned on all clients.
Comment linking /
on “Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites”Submitted I kind of like rebasing as a story · 307 points
HN discussionPeople do read it. The problem is that you have to consistently prove your content is worth their time for an awfully long stretch. I started my blog[1] back in 2019, and it wasn’t until after I published my 100th post in mid-2023 that some of my articles began hitting the front page of HN. For many, that’s just too long and not worth the effort. In my case, I wrote because I enjoy writing and often reread my own po…
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on “Why blog if nobody reads it?”Submitted Dependency injection frameworks add confusion as a story · 154 points
HN discussionI've been maintaining my tiny corner[^1] of the internet for around six years and the lack of readers never bothered me that much; nor did the influx of LLMs. I write when I feel like it, when I have something to say, or when I think it's something my past self would read. Sure, there have been times when some of the articles hit the front page of Hacker News but most of what I write gets little attention and that's…
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on “How to post when no one is reading”Submitted ETag and HTTP Caching as a story · 152 points
HN discussionSteve Ballmer never diversified his Microsoft stock like Bill Gates did. But it made him an immensely rich guy—currently richer than Gates himself. Now, does that mean picking a company and going all in is a good idea? Probably not. I’m all about improving my writing to be useful to others. However, diversifying my content to attract a broader audience usually results in the most vapid, formulaic, clickbaity article…
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on “How to write blog posts that developers read”Submitted Reminiscing CGI Scripts as a story · 61 points
HN discussionNot much at all. If you are using a static site generator, they usually support it out of the box. Recently, one of my posts hit the front page here, and a few people emailed me asking for an RSS[1] feed. It turned out that it was just a simple config update to enable this on Hugo. Other SSGs usually support it out of the box too. Plus, it’s not too hard to build the XML from your HTML if you want to build it yourse…
Comment linking /index.xml
on “I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too”Submitted Revisiting Interface Segregation in Go as a story · 60 points
HN discussionThe Hacker News folks do love their RSS. I also added support for RSS[1] to my site when one of my posts hit the front page, and a few people reached out for an RSS link. I came to the industry way later than the Web 2.0 inception and didn’t even know about it until a while back. [1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml
Comment linking /index.xml
on “I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too”Submitted Link Blog in a Static Site as a story · 56 points
HN discussionRSS is a wonderfully simple solution to get notifications for things I care about. I came to the software industry a lot later than the inception of Web 2.0 and rediscovered RSS almost accidentally. I advocate for it too. You’d be surprised how many people still care about this. My static site build broke the RSS[1] once recently, and I immediately got like 5 emails from different people. [1]: https://rednafi.com/in…
Comment linking /index.xml
on “I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too”Submitted Taming Conditionals with Bitmasks as a story · 25 points
HN discussionIt also depends on what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. Do it too much, and you’ll incur the wrath of the mob—or worse, be ignored into oblivion. In the software world, salespeople are almost universally hated because of how obnoxious they can be. I recently attended a Couchbase talk, and now the salespeople are all over my inbox and LinkedIn DMs. You don’t want to sell your work like that. While not al…
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on “Sell yourself, sell your work”Submitted Dysfunctional Options Pattern in Go as a story · 19 points
HN discussionHard disagree. I write for myself and still use the search functionality on my site [1] to find things quickly. I also regularly read the work of Julia Evans, Brandur Leach, Armin Ronacher, and Patrick Dubroy, and none of them generate slop about the latest tech. On top of that, engineering blogs from Netflix, Uber, Stripe, and Salesforce are irreplaceable for me. I use LLMs a ton and still think human writing is ev…
Comment linking /search
on “Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog”Submitted Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every…
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on “Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog”Submitted Dysfunctional Options Pattern in Go as a story · 9 points
HN discussionFunny indeed. I recently needed to set up GNU stow to manage my dotfiles on a new machine. So I searched google and lo and behold, my own stuff was among the top 10 results. https://rednafi.com/misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolen...
Comment linking /misc/dotfile_stewardship_for_the_indolent/
on “It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI”Submitted Gateway pattern for external service calls as a story · 7 points
HN discussionBlogging pushes me to explore things I probably wouldn’t otherwise. That’s been the main reason I’ve stuck with it pretty consistently[1] for the past five years. Getting attention was never the goal, so the rise of LLMs has mostly been background noise to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve searched for something on Google, only to land on my own page. Over the years, though, things picked up. Now, I’m se…
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on “It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI”Submitted Please don't hijack my Python root logger as a story · 6 points
HN discussionStarted my blog[1] around five years ago and never looked back. Before that, I got burned by Medium and decided: never again. Maintaining your own little corner on the internet is easier than ever, though I agree it still requires some technical know-how. Also, I’m not sure how much I trust these WYSIWYG blog engines like Squarespace or Weebly. [1]: https://rednafi.com
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on “Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet”Submitted Reminiscing CGI Scripts as a story · 6 points
HN discussionMy blog works similarly [1]. Everything is written in Markdown, then Hugo builds the site, and GitHub Actions publishes it to Pages. While my blog gets around 20k monthly views, discoverability is still a problem. [1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/behind_the_blog/
Comment linking /misc/behind_the_blog/
on “Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time”Submitted Limit Goroutines with Buffered Channels as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNeat. I maintain a blog myself[1] and prefer reading content written by actual human beings, not corporate shills or spammers masquerading on Medium and Dev.to. But I feel like the whole indie web thing hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues. RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough. Also, adding support for them is difficult for non-technical or even semi-technical people. My blog does s…
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on “Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time”Submitted Writing a TOTP Client in Go as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
