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Kevin Burke

kevin.burke.dev · Personal blog · on HN since 2019

Kevin Burke, a software engineer, writes about code review, testing, databases, home networking, and local utilities.

What HN saysHN commenters cite his posts arguing code review catches bugs better than testing, and his piece on city-run electric utilities.
24HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
26stories submitted
2.0Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Reddit’s database has two tables (2012)
    5 people · 207 points · first shared 2021 · 247 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
    3 people · 237 points · first shared 2021 · 324 comments on HN
  3. 3
    Building a Better Home Network
    3 people · 8 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Why code review beats testing (2011)
    3 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
  5. 5
    Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities
    2 people · 420 points · first shared 2025 · 396 comments on HN
  6. 6
    Let employees sell their equity
    2 people · 269 points · first shared 2020 · 276 comments on HN
  7. 7
    Let Us Open URL's in a Specific Browser Profile
    2 people · 8 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
  8. 8
    Fast, parallel, correct tests against a database
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    Circleci is hopelessly insecure
    2 people · first shared 2019
  10. 10
  11. 11
    You can build a skyscraper anywhere in Davis, California
    1 people · 263 points · first shared 2022 · 179 comments on HN
  12. 12
    If someone asks if you have any questions, ask a question
    1 people · 229 points · first shared 2020 · 136 comments on HN
  13. 13
    Decline the 15 Minute Post-Vaccination Waiting Period
    1 people · 16 points · first shared 2021 · 28 comments on HN
  14. 14
  15. 15
    Preferred Stock and Common Stock Aren’t the Same
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

commandlinefan · 2022-01-04
> Code reviews are not a tool intended mainly to catch bugs Well, not to detract from your point (I agree), but what little research has been done in this area suggests that code reviews are actually one of the best ways to catch bugs: https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/the-best-ways-to-find-bugs-in-your-code/
JensRantil · 2021-12-16
The best migration is no-migration. That is not having to move data at all. This becomes increasingly more important with larger datasets. One way of doing that is to simply serialize data in something like Protobuf and have a generic schema that rarely/never needs to be altered[1]. Adding a new field to the Protobuf is a no-op. [1] https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/
neves · 2019-06-05
The practice that most reduces the incidence of tests is code review: https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/the-best-ways-to-find-bugs-in-your-code/
matthewmueller · 2022-05-14
Sure, it's actually been a long journey since PHP. I switched from PHP to Node about 11 years ago. I was probably one of the first 100 Node.js developers. My biggest contribution there was creating https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio. Go spoils me because it "just works". The best way I can explain it is when I'm stuck on something in Go, it's almost always my bad, not something that Go is doing poorly. This is in contrast to the Node.js ecosystem where it feels like half of the problems I run into shouldn't be my responsibility. I strongly relate to this post by Kevin Burke: https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/one-year-of-node-js/. A lot has improved since this was written. We're finally over the ES Module vs CommonJS hump, Typescript has become the defacto standard, Babel is less used now and Webpack is effectively abstracted away. I still run into way too many problems with the ecosystem and the transition to Rust will make the ecosystem more complicated, not less. My transition from Node.js to Go happened because I was working solo on https://standupjack.com/ and I kept running into issues with the message broker. It was using the most popular RabbitMQ client for Node, yet it was still super flaky. About 6 years ago, I was chatting with TJ Holowaychuk and he kept singing Go's praises. One holiday I decided to rewrite just the message broker in Go. I got it into production in 3 days and didn't have anymore problems with it. That set me on the Go journey :)
puika · 2023-07-27
I also don't see the point in mocking out your database unless you have slow tests due to hardware constraints, a huge project or your db tests not being parallelized. Regarding the latter I've had much success with a similar approach to [1], and with a few helpers in each layer (service-repo) my tests have never been cleaner. [1]: https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/fast-parallel-database-tests
Macha · 2023-05-25
Unlikely, given Reddit's past schema design. One table of "things", and then another table of attributes of those things in a entity,key,value format. https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/
jallasprit · 2022-09-23
I'm not the right person to answer the core question here, but this looks a lot like this: https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/
jethkl · 2022-05-04
Agree that on behavioral front, there is not much new signal after a few hours of conversation. Some evidence for this is a well-known study [1]. Unsure if the study has been validated, but the idea has stuck with me. Regarding cognitive decay: I like to think time is simply pruning the weak and lazy neurons. At least that's what my remaining grey matter is telling itself. Your comment made me laugh. Thanks. [1] https://kevin.burke.dev/pdf/30_seconds_teacher_quality.pdf
luhn · 2020-01-08
AWS claims that VPC traffic is immune from MiTM attacks. [0] (Although they strangely don't talk about this much, and I can't even find official documentation of it.) So within a VPC, you can forgo certificate validation. However, in general certificate validation would protect you. The attacker wouldn't have a valid certificate, so your application would refuse to connect to the malicious endpoint. [0] https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/aws-alb-validation-tls-reply/
auslander · 2019-09-13
CircleCI trusts 8 analytics companies with your source code and API tokens https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/circleci-is-hopelessly-insecure/
robocat · 2019-09-05
"CircleCI trusts 8 analytics companies with your source code and API tokens, October 9, 2017. When you navigate to your project in CircleCI's UI, Javascript from eight different analytics companies gets loaded and executed in your browser." So, did they do anything about that? Even if using iframes and a secure api over postMessage/onmessage: safe, and security can be controlled by the external provider i.e. safer for both parties (ideally the servers pass the security context between each other - we even use an iframe internally for all the same reasons). https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/circleci-is-hopelessly-insecure/
sherdil2022 · 2025-06-05
There are many reasons and there is a long way to go for these interviews to be inclusive and logical. I have been trying my best to change the culture around interviews and mention this to all hiring managers and interviewers to be more inclusive and use points from the following articles (not a complete list): Don’t Do Interviews, Do Discussions! https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/dont-do-interviews-do-discussio… Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ Developer Interviews, and how you are doing them wrong. https://www.coscreen.co/blog/you-are-interviewing-developers-all-wrong… Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/phone-screens-broken/ Stop Interviewing With Leet Code https://fev.al/posts/leet-code/ I'm a very slow thinker https://sive.rs/slow Screen In to diversify your workforce https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/screen-diversify-your-workforce-kathlee… Interview accommodations for NeuroDivergent people is a right - but not all know these rights. And some companies may not care - and many hiring managers don't even have awareness! It's a long way to go to make interviews more inclusive - but don't go down without fighting for your rights!

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