Defects are not the fault of programmers
Sorry this one is late! I've been having a rough time lately, which I think is pretty normal right now for everyone. But I'm doing a bit better now and hope...
Workshop Innovations and New Website Essay
Office hours What I'm thinking of doing is office hours every two weeks, alternating between an evening slot and a morning slot. So this week let's do office...
If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
This essay says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should "ban inheritance completely". You see these arguments a lot, as well as things like...
New Essay: In Praise of AutoHotKey
No office hours this week Still thinking through how to best do office hours. I think based on attendance it'd probably be more comfortable to do something...
Rage Against the God Machine
Content warning: mental illness, depression, abuse, PTSD, stuff like that. If you're sensitive to these topics you may want to skip this one. On Wednesday I...
How I Write Talks
New Workshop Given the interest in the previous Alloy workshop, I've opened up a second day on June 22nd. Same discount applies, [redacted] for 500 off. It's...
New Essay, Office Hours, and a short essay
Workshop Sold Out The Alloy workshop is now sold out. Dang, that was fast. If you're still interested in this, please add yourself to the waitlist. If enough...
This Newsletter is Too Popular
New Talk My Deconstruct talk, "What we can Learn from Software History", is now out! It covers why studying history so important and what it looks like to...
Making Illegal States Unrepresentable
I have opinions on this Okay so the saying is "make illegal states unrepresentable". The meaning is that we should structure programs in a way it such that a...
Announcing Alloydocs, updates on major projects
Alloydocs It's finally ready! Almost 13,000 words of Alloy reference, techniques, and pitfalls. There's still a lot of work to do when people inevitably...
A Very Brief Intro to Formal Methods (aka my job)
Office Hours Worked pretty well last time, so let's do it again! This Friday, 11 AM CST, Zoom Room [redacted], password is [redacted]. Not sure if this is...
What's the Most Expensive Software Per Byte?
Is it 1 dollar/mb? 10 dollars/mb? 100? 100,000?
Language Warts and Vim Trix
New(ish post) Last week I published a new post called 10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages and forgot to share it here. In that time we've...
Please don't write your documentation in Markdown
Please don't write your documentation in Markdown. Please. I'm begging you. Markdown is tolerable for short documentation, like a readme.md. Past that, it's...
Special Purpose Languages
Greetings from the end of the world! Sorry things are late, I had writers ablockalypse. Remote workshops All the conferences I was supposed to go to are now...
On Customization
A couple letters back I talked about how mental models don't scale. If you heavily customize the environment to your needs, it'll be hard for other people to...
Online Workshops, Project Updates, New Post
Back from vacation! Turns out I'm bad at vacationing. Anyway, quick update on projects: Crossover Project: I recently gave a 10 minute lightning talk draft...
The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition
Yes I know I'm technically on vacation but if I go too long without writing I die from a witch's curse and I don't want to work on longform projects For...
On Scaling Mental Models
No Newsletter Next Week I'll be on vacation in the Caribbean, sipping drinks and juggling for Hermit crabs. The Actual Thing I'm a vim user. I've used Vim...
Donald Knuth Was Framed
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...