Dan Luu

@dan-luu · 15 positions · On ppll ↗

Programmer who has worked on hardware verification at Centaur, on infrastructure at Microsoft and Google, and latterly at Wave. He writes long, data-heavy posts at danluu.com that test the software industry's folk wisdom against whatever evidence can actually be found.

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What Dan Luu says most about

software quality 5

Almost every software project has cheap testing wins left on the table: basic random testing, static analysis and fault injection pay for themselves the first time they are run.
Conventional testing is not sufficient: crude purpose-built checking tools of a few thousand lines find bugs that testing does not.

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design 2

Writing to files safely is too hard to do with raw syscalls; application code should go through a library or a database.
The most-cited study showing that language design affects software quality rests on misclassified repositories.

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metascience 2

The answer to weak studies of programming practice is to fund better ones, not to conclude that the question cannot be measured.
The most-cited study showing that language design affects software quality rests on misclassified repositories.

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simplicity 2

Conference programmes and the tech press over-represent complex architectures, so teams copy techniques their scale does not need.
Even at top-100 traffic levels most applications can be served by a simple monolith, and it is cheaper to build than a complex architecture.

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