Happy Precedence Day!
Happy precedence day! (For my non-American followers, it's a pun on a national holiday we got today) New Consulting Offering I'm now available to do paid...
New Essay: Feature Interaction Bugs
Read it here! This has gone through some fits and starts, so it's finally good to get it out. I sketched out the first draft in 2018. 2018! ps y'all are gr8
Project updates, request for help, braindump
Update on Major Projects I've finally, finally started drafting out the crossover project. And only two months late! Right now the outline is almost a...
On Emulation
Last week I said that I had some thoughts on "emulation" but hadn't yet hammered them out. So today I'm gonna hammer them out. I might eventually polish this...
New Essay: The Business Case For Formal Methods
New essay at the site! The Business Case for Formal Methods is a primer on the financial benefits of using FM, plus case studies and a demo. It's a...
A Totally Polished and not-at-all half-baked Take on Static vs Dynamic Typing
I'm back from Madfest! Since this is a newsletter computer things and not a newsletter about juggling things, I won't say anything about it. Except I got to...
Three Ways Juggling is Like Programming
I'm going to my first ever juggling convention this weekend! If any of you are in Madison, hit me up. Not sure if I'll be able to get away from Madfest, but...
New Essay, Intentional Errors, and a TLA+ CLI
New Essay I haven't posted any essays on formal methods in a while, so let's start of the new year right: Hypermodeling Hyperproperties When we design...
Bill Kentstravaganza
Bill Kent is one of the unsung greats of software engineering. I get why Data and Reality is obscure: the 2nd edition is out of circulation and the 3rd...
Updates on the Too-Many Projects
Happy first week of the new year! Wanted to give some quick updates on the projects I'm working on, so you know what to expect from me in the coming few...
Back up your arguments plz
A couple days ago I read Putting devs before users: how frameworks destroyed web performance, a rant about why the web is so slow. You don't have to read...
On Marketing Formal Methods
Hi everyone! Back from vacation! Spent most of it cooking. Check out this beauty: Bottom layer is a dark chocolate and peanut butter ganache, top layer is a...
Why Python is my Favorite Language
Merry Hannukah! I've been trying very hard not to think about anything tech related this week, but also want to keep to a weekly schedule of newsletters....
Computer Things: YOW Roundup Edition
Hi everybody, Back from YOW! I spent the last two weeks in Australia, giving talks at three separate conferences. I was off but back now. Here's some...
Science Turf War
Conferences I'm speaking at YOW! I'll be presenting Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+ in Sydney, Melbourne, AND Brisbane. If you're coming to one of...
New Essay! (Also Workshop Field Notes)
Workshop Improvements Apologies for not sending anything on Monday; I was doing a workshop for Facebook! I had a blast, but I'm usually dead by the end of...
A few smaller updates
Ethnography of antipatterns We all can think of reasons why it's bad to use single-letter variable names in most contexts. Why people do it anyway? I usually...
What is a "beautiful" proof?
A couple weeks ago I was obsessed with a math problem. addition over the integers is commutative: a + b = b + a. Multiplication, which is repeated addition,...
Back on Windows
Over the past month my Fedora installation got increasingly unstable- hardware glitches, randomly losing internet, not entering sleep mode. Yesterday I got...
Canonical Examples
Canonical Examples Two tweets from last week. 1) A question I asked friday:¹ If you know what property-based testing is and don't use it in your code, why...