Top all-time · #2062
Stephen Brennan
Personal blog · brennan.iosystemsprogramming
Stephen Brennan's personal blog at brennan.io covers systems and programming. Since 2016, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 64 times, most often “Tutorial – Write a System Call”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.
Most-linked posts?
- Tutorial – Write a System Call9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2016-11-14
- Write a Shell in C (2015)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-12-06
- Embracing Modularity with Meson4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-05-08
- When it comes to Git history, less is more3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-06-16
- Development of a Developer (2017)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-03-14
- Why You Should Hire Computer Science Majors3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-09-05
- Stack Overflow Users Rejoice as Pattern Matching Is Added to Python2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-10
- My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-12
- Linked Lists Are Still Hard2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-21
What Hacker News says?
They should do a deal: “We fix this for QWERTY users, and in return American web devs vow to stop filtering out Shift in numeric fields, which is fine on QWERTY but prevents AZERTY users from typing top-row digits because those digits require Shift.” Apparently this bad habit impacts DVORAK users too : https://brennan.io/2021/03/03/textboxes/
Comment linking /2021/03/03/textboxes/
on “Microduck”Submitted Write a Shell in C (2015) as a story · 379 points
HN discussioni recommend C to start with because there are more low-level projects you can work on for practice in C than in Rust; the biggest one being kernel hacking. i definitely recommend K&R to get familiar with the language, but it's a small language so that shouldn't take too much time. i think the best way to get started in low-level programming is to develop in linux on a raspberry pi and hack your own kernel. explore s…
Comment linking /2016/11/14/kernel-dev-ep3/
on “Learning operating system development using Linux kernel and Raspberry Pi”Submitted Implementing simple cooperative threads in C as a story · 304 points
HN discussionIt's very educational to dig into stuff that everyone takes for granted or even try implement your own version that does similar things (at a smaller scale and with less features, performance and security of course, just for educational purposes, not to serve as a real replacement). E.g. writing your own shell sounds hard but you can do it in an hour (of course it'd be very bare compared to even ash), I once did it…
Comment linking /2016/11/14/kernel-dev-ep3/
on “Unraveling rm: what happens when you run it?”Submitted Write a Shell in C as a story · 276 points
HN discussionI decided to read ep1[0] too and I saw a picture "use all the memory". I don't know if it's funnier that I checked if you have an "alt" HTML tag or that you actually wrote the text from the picture. People with alt tags are MVPs. :) [0] - https://brennan.io/2016/10/13/kernel-dev-ep1/
Comment linking /2016/10/13/kernel-dev-ep1/
on “Tutorial – Write a System Call”Submitted When it comes to Git history, less is more as a story · 250 points
HN discussionstephen brennan wrote a great article [1] on how to write a shell in C. it's a little more simply than DAS' implementation, but it's a fantastic read. [1] https://brennan.io/2015/01/16/write-a-shell-in-c/
Comment linking /2015/01/16/write-a-shell-in-c/
on “A Bourne-style shell built from scratch in 35 minutes [video]”Submitted Write a Shell in C (2015) as a story · 205 points
HN discussionI've always preferred Stephen Brennan's approach mentioned here: https://brennan.io/2020/05/08/meson/ This is the approach I take with my C and C++ projects, although I've swapped meson out for CMake. I still have my CMake projects generate pkg-config files as well so that I don't force CMake on any consuming projects (just because I suffered with CMake doesn't mean you have to, although you can as well :))
Comment linking /2020/05/08/meson/
on “How to Structure C Projects: These Best Practices Worked for Me”Submitted Tutorial – Write a System Call as a story · 198 points
HN discussionHope this can help [1]. Otherwise, if you just want an API wrapped up with python [2]. [1] http://brennan.io/2015/01/16/write-a-shell-in-c/ [2] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-pythocli/
Comment linking /2015/01/16/write-a-shell-in-c/
on “Ask HN: How do I make a shell?”Submitted Linked Lists Are Still Hard as a story · 180 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stack Overflow Users Rejoice as Pattern Matching Is Added to Python as a story · 119 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualizing Gzip Compression with Python as a story · 79 points
HN discussionSubmitted Write a System Call (2016) as a story · 58 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fare Hacking on BART as a story · 46 points
HN discussionSubmitted Space Cadet Pinball on Linux as a story · 34 points
HN discussionSubmitted Embracing Modularity with Meson as a story · 33 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stack Overflow Users Rejoice as Pattern Matching Is Added to Python 3.10 as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Windows 10 Installer Dystopia as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tutorial – Write a System Call as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Build your own OS: Pre-emptive Multitasking as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Linked Lists Are Still Hard as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tutorial – Write a Linux System Call as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why I Don't Have Fun With Claude Code as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tutorial – Write a Shell in C (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tutorial – Write a Shell in C as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
