Computer Things
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What is a "beautiful" proof?
November 11, 2019
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
November 8, 2019
Over the past month my Fedora installation got increasingly unstable- hardware glitches, randomly losing internet, not entering sleep mode. Yesterday I got...
Canonical Examples
November 4, 2019
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...
We Are Not Special
October 30, 2019
Why am I doing the Crossover Project? Because I keep seeing shit like this:¹ The person there never built a house. They don't know what it's like to build a...
New Post! Plus Upkeep
October 28, 2019
Newsletter Title I still don't have a good name, but I've decided "hell with it" and am going with "Computer Things" for the time being. If you are on this...
Automation vs Augmentation
October 21, 2019
The best chess player in the world is Magnus Carlsen. He's been the world chamption since 2013. We have him play against a 2018 macbook pro running a good...
Software isn't designed for power users
October 16, 2019
Yesterday a friend asked me to help her with a bug. She wasn't a programmer, she was using someone else's software. Helping her made me think a little on...
Data and Reality, 2nd Edition
October 14, 2019
People who've listened to me for more than, like, five minutes probably know that my favorite software book, bar none, is Data and Reality. It's about how...
On Documentation
October 11, 2019
I'm part of the Alloy (1) board and am responsible for "outreach and education", which mostly means I ask people what they find annoying about the tool. Part...
New Post: Formally Modeling Database Migrations
October 9, 2019
Hi everybody, I wrote a new post for the blog! It's about how you can use formal methods to make sure your database migrations are correct. I really wanted...
On Hating Your Tools
October 4, 2019
I recently read Why software developers (quite honestly) hate Agile, which argues that the Problem With Agile is that everybody's going it wrong, that the...
The kind of thing this is gonna be
October 2, 2019
Hiyall, No name yet, no description yet, but might as well get this started with why I want to do this. So the stereotypical view of writing is that it's...