Raku: A Language for Gremlins
By Gremlins, For Gremlins™
GitHub has too many hidden features
Discover undocumented features of GitHub: open repos in online VSCode, add experimental features, regex code search, and more!
Queryability and the Sublime Mediocrity of SQL
I'm going to a small academic workshop on design next week. This got me thinking of the various meanings of "design", which got me thinking about the various...
More Software Projects need Defenses of Design
Explain your choices to your users!
In Defense of Slow Feedback Loops
Goodhart's Law is a cruel master.
What chocolatiering taught me about programming
And also a new blog post (and also a Patreon announcement)
Programming Language Perversity
Harold Abelson once said that code should be written for humans to read and only incidentally for computers to write. It follows that, like any form of...
Maybe Software Engineers could learn something from Linguistics
Stealing ideas from other fields to make our own field slightly better off
Agile is people, the rest is commentary.
Agile is "just" four principles. Simple, right?
Some tests are stronger than others
"Stronger" tests are better for determining correctness, while "weaker" tests are useful for localizing errors.
What's between a set and a sequence?
Sets -> {???, ???} -> Sequences
The sneering of the wilderness
Why I am so excited about the Vision Pro, and why so many other people aren't.
Collecting and curating material is good and we should do it more
Chronicling, plugin systems, and six other disjointed ideas combine in an argument of how to "engineerize" software more
Mostly announcements and plans but also some fun floating point trivia
This is a really busy week for me, so light newsletter this time. Let's start with obligatory stuff and then get into fun newsletter stuff. Announcements So...
Problems harder than NP-Complete
People always talk about "P vs NP" like P problems are easy and NP problems are hard. This is a useful day-to-day model but also an oversimplification....
The seven specification ur-languages
A brief overview of the formal specification landscape
When to prefer inheritance to composition
Hint: it involves the typechecker
Some of my workshop teaching tricks
And some thoughts on the role in software in solving problems
GPT4 should be part of your toolkit
On March 24 I wrote GPT is revolutionary. On March 27 I got access to GPT4.1 Now that I've used it for a month, I'm firmly in the "this is the greatest thing...
In Defense of No-code('s potential)
Don't think about businesses, think about *people*