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...
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...