DanLuu.com is the personal blog of Dan Luu, known for long-form essays that mix systems thinking with careful measurement and clear writing. The topics range from computer latency and input lag, testing versus informal reasoning, and concurrency bugs, to industry pieces on developer compensation and curated lists of programming blogs worth reading. Many posts include data, historical context, and reproducible reasoning, which is why the site is often cited in courses and shared across the developer community. The design is intentionally minimal, which puts all attention on the ideas.
136 articles from this blog
Analyzes the performance overhead of enabling integer overflow checks in compiled code, estimating a small penalty for most applications.
A tutorial on how to write your own malloc memory allocator in C, explaining core concepts and providing sample code.
The article argues against the idea that market forces prevent discrimination, using historical examples from finance to challenge this common tech industry belief.
Analyzing Linux commit messages using TF-IDF to identify what individual developers work on, beyond common stop words.
A developer logs a week's worth of software bugs they encountered, from Ubuntu to GitHub, and discusses the need for better testing practices.
A developer details how they dramatically improved their static blog's load time by optimizing JavaScript and CSS loading.
Analysis of build failure rates in open source projects vs. corporate work, using Travis CI data to compare reliability.
A literature review examining empirical studies on the impact of static vs. dynamic typing on software quality, finding mostly small effects.
Explains new Intel CLWB and PCOMMIT instructions for managing non-volatile memory (NVRAM) and overcoming performance bottlenecks.
Compares cache eviction policies like LRU and Random, analyzing their performance using SPEC CPU benchmarks and miss rate data.
A critique arguing that testing is essential for complex systems, countering the claim that informal reasoning is superior.
The author argues that using intrinsics for high-performance code is unreliable and more work than writing assembly by hand.
Court denies preliminary approval of a $324.5M class action settlement in a high-tech employee wage-fixing antitrust lawsuit.
A 1997 design contest analysis where Verilog users outperformed VHDL users, sparking industry debate and controversy.
The article argues for using analytics and data-driven methods, inspired by hardware testing, to automatically find common software bugs.
A guide to editing binary files directly, explaining why it's useful and demonstrating basic techniques with simple tools.
Article critiques a misleading report claiming no gender pay gap in tech, using evidence from the AAUW study to refute the claim.
A historical account of Oracle's poor performance in a 1983 database benchmark and their alleged attempt to have the professor behind it fired.
An engineer reflects on a difficult college project to argue that schools should teach debugging as a core skill, not just theory.
A programmer analyzes whether math classes are useful in a software development career, based on personal experience.
