I built a reference site for the recurring hard problems in software

What it does

A field guide for senior engineers, architects, and engineering leaders. Failure modes, red flags, hard decisions, and practical playbooks for recurring software delivery problems.

A field guide for staff engineers, tech leads, architects, and engineering managers dealing with recurring software delivery problems. AI did not invent the ordinary gaps in software delivery like incomplete specifications, rushed reviews unclear ownership, or architecture that is harder to explain than we would like. It made those gaps easier to carry forward into working code. This is why engineering judgment matters more than ever. A glimpse of the catalog. Each entry walks through how the pattern starts, how it escalates, what it looks like at early, mid, and late stages, and what good responses look like. A rewrite framed as cleanup becomes a long-running replacement with no stable…from thehardparts.dev

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and it was hard to decide when to stop, either on the way information is presented or when to stop with adding entries. It's not meant as a blog, but rather as a reference that keeps growing. Link: https://thehardparts.dev Currently I've created 4 main section…

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  I published a book to save you from my software architecture mistakes2024 · leanpub.com · ▲100

  Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…

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  The Changelog - CodeNewbie and Community with Saron Yitbarek2015 · changelog.com · ▲57

  How to help more people discover software development

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  Hello Tech Pros: Confirmation Bias2016 · gadgetsprimer.com · ▲60

  The 3rd dysfunction of a software team

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  I built a platform for projects to find maintainers2022 · seeking-maintainers.net · ▲49

  A few days ago, someone I follow asked the community for help maintaining his side-project, 512kb.club. This got me thinking. There are loads of maintainers out there feeling burnt out, but they can't abandon their project since people are depending on the project to be maintained. In an effort to combat this, I built a website that lists projects looking for new maintainers. It's still quite empty and has some rough edges. Any feedback is very welcome!

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  My first software project – a website to set goals and track progress2024 · opus.cafe · ▲17

  Two years ago, I started building this site that allows people to document their learning and progress in real time. The idea is: as you learn new things, you document your progress piece by piece, creating a collection of failures, breakthroughs, and knowledge. Along the way, your friends can cheer you on, and the community can give you tips and feedback. Over time, we'll create a public collection on how different problems were solved. With each progress, the site prompts you to reflect on questions like, "If you could go back in time, what do you wish you had known?" This was my first web…

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  Big Picture” project management for software developers2022 · projectburndown.com · ▲8

  We got tired of not being able to accurately answer "When will this be done?" and "Will anyone be required to work overtime on the current schedule?", or spending too much time in meetings and standups trying to answer those questions. Just opened up for beta. Would love some opinionated developers to guide future improvements (or feedback on the general idea).

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  Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi▲319

  Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.

  Work · 24d ago · loficities.com

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  Smooth Recorder▲257

  Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop

  Work · 18d ago · smoothrecorder.com

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  Figma Specs▲223

  A container for your context that lives on the Figma canvas

  Work · 3d ago · figma.com

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  The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read▲190

  Work · 12d ago · readrare.com

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  Brila▲1,364

  One-page websites from real Google Maps reviews

  AI · Apr 2026 · brila.ai

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  A game where you build a GPU▲964

  Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are

  Life & fun · Apr 2026 · jaso1024.com

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  I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work▲915

  Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.

  AI · Apr 2026 · github.com

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  Fathom 3.0▲800

  AI meeting notes: now bot-free, in ChatGPT & Claude + more

  AI · Apr 2026 · fathom.ai

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  Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)▲786

  I made a laptop stand out of solid concrete, in the style of brutalist architecture, with themes of urbex and urban decay

  Life & fun · Apr 2026 · sam-burns.com

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  I built a frontpage for personal blogs▲783

  With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories. There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/ If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.

  AI · Apr 2026 · text.blogosphere.app