Some thoughts on good spec properties
Lots of updates this week! First of all, my talk Is Software Engineering Real Engineering is now available online! It's the video version of the crossover...
Picat is my favorite new toolbox language
I'm teaching a TLA+ workshop in two weeks! Register here, use the code C0MPUT3RTHINGS for 15% off. I always like to find new "toolbox languages". These are...
Was Javascript really made in 10 days?
I once heard that Javascript has so many warts because the first version was made in just ten days. I was curious 1) if this is true, and 2) if it explains...
Formal Methods can't fix everything and that's okay
Finally done with conferences and glad to be back in Chicago. Next big event is the TLA+ workshop on October 16, which still has slots available! The faster...
The best model checker is your head
Perceptual learning through model checking helps build intuition to find bugs in software designs.
If you work on a big language, I'd like to talk
The October TLA+ workshop still has some slots left! Register here, use the code C0MPUT3RTHINGS for 15% off. I wanted to write some stuff on TLA+ modeling...
Time zones are hard because people are hard
Greetings from Australia!1 It's the morning of September 5th for me and the night of September 4th in the US. In two weeks when I fly back, I will leave...
My painful, futile quest for programmable slideshow animations
I wanted a slideshow software with programmable animations. I got suffering instead.
Educational Codebases
We get better at coding by reading code, but code isn't designed to be studied. So let's make projects that *can* be studied.
Turing kicked us out of Heaven
The halting problem is why we can't have nice things.
Symmetric Properties
If you take a square and rotate it 90 degrees, you get back an identical square. We say the square is rotationally symmetric. Similarly, if you reflect it...
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?