Alloy 6 First Impressions
So a couple of weeks ago I wrote Finding Alloy's Niche, where I said I wasn't expecting the new Alloy 6 release to change all that much. It came out last...
Documentation could be so much better
A year or so back I wrote the newsletter post Don't use Markdown for documentation, where I complained about its lack of extensibility and cross-project...
Finding Alloy's Niche
(This gets a little rambly, I'm trying to figure out some stuff and thought it'd be nice to share my thinking process.) I've been thinking a lot about Alloy...
A Very Brief SPLASH Writeup
Sup nerds! Last week the SPLASH conference— the main academic conference for programming language research— came to town. I decided on a whim to buy a ticket...
The Myth of Self-Documenting Code
One of the weirdest things about software engineering is how many people hate comments. Like actually hate. There are influential people out there who say...
Defense in Depth is actually a good thing
So my TLAConf talk is out and I was gonna talk about technique research but then I saw this tweet and knew I had to rant about it: If after-release testing...
New Essay and Thoughts on Clickfarm
New Essay: How to Solve the Sudoku Puzzle with programming New essay up! How to Solve the Sudoku Puzzle with programming. This one is a little conceptual, so...
Jewmain Driven Design
Sup nerds, I'm back from Strange Loop! I have a million ideas I want to write about now, but I'll stick to one of the lighter, sillier ones. Based on a claim...
Optimizing State Spaces with Combinatorics
I'm preparing my talk for the TLA+ Conference this week. I asked around about intermediate stuff people wanted me to cover and there was a lot of interest in...
There Was No Formal Methods Winter
Over the weekend, I read the question Is the Formal Methods Winter About to End on Lobsters: Formal methods (theorem proving, model checking, static...
How ACOUP made me a better programmer
Hey nerds, I'm back! Still not all that recovered from mental health garbage, but turns out writing is a big part of my mental health, so stopping that for a...
Hiatus
Hi everyone, My depression has gotten a lot worse in the past month and it's seriously disrupted my ability to work. I'm taking steps to handle it, but in...
Art vs Engineering
I'm finally (finally!) working on a new version of the Are We Really Engineers talk, which has got me once again thinking about the differences between...
Algorithm Monocultures
A while back I got really into "corporate blogs". Why are they so soulless? Why do they all sound the same? I asked a friend had managed one of these blogs,...
I ****ing hate Science
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
Program Spaces and Interesting Counterexamples
Okay so let's say I have a function f and ask you to figure out what it is. Input's a list of integers, output is one integer. You gotta figure it out by...
10 Misconceptions about Formal Methods
Whole lotta talk about formal methods last week. Moshe Vardi dropped an ACM piece, Jean Yang wrote an essay, and Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya frontpaged Hacker...
What is a "Specification"?
What is a specification? The most popular testing library in Ruby is called RSpec, and uses the terminology of Behavior-Driven Development, where tests are...
Physical vs Logical Time
There's nothing I'm rarin' to share so I figured I'd talk about a concept in verification I see a lot but haven't seen explicitly discussed anywhere. I don't...
Comment the Why *and* the What
People say "comment the why, not the what", the idea being that the code should be self-documenting and the comments should only be a last resort for...