How to review code

How to review code
11 minutes by Matthias Endler

Matthias has been reviewing other people’s code for a while now, more than two decades to be precise. Nowadays, he spends around 50-70% of time reviewing code in some form or another. And over time, he learned a thing or two about how to review code effectively.

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Unsustainability of Moore’s Law
15 minutes by Charles Rosenbauer

Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon chip doubles. This is Moore’s Law. Roughly every five years, the cost to build a factory for making such chips doubles, and the number of companies that can do it halves. 25 years ago, there were about 40 such companies and the cost to build a fab was about $2-4 billion. Today, there are either two or three such companies left.

P-fast trie: Lexically ordered hash map
5 minutes by Tony Finch

The article proposes a "p-fast trie" data structure that uses a hash map of stratified levels instead of a traditional tree structure found in qp-tries. While offering theoretical improvement with O(log k) search time versus qp-trie's O(k), Tony questions its practical value due to potentially higher memory usage and less cache-friendly behavior.

Big O vs Hardware: Better Complexity ≠ Better Performance
12 minutes by Abhinav Upadhyay

In algorithm design, we often rely on time complexity to compare solutions. It tells us how the work done by an algorithm grows with the size of its input. But real-world performance also depends on how well the code runs on hardware.

So you want to parse a PDF?
7 minutes by Eliot Jones

Eliot looks at how parsing a PDF should proceed according to the specification. He compares this with a survey of sample files where he saw a 0.5% error rate due to non-compliant files. All tested PDF viewers were able to open these files because most parsers are extended to support non-compliant files.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• How to write a good design document