New Post! Plus Upkeep
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 newsletter, you will hear about computer things. Not necessarily good or interesting computer things, but they will definitely be things and almost-definitely be about computers.
New Post: How Fast Do I Talk?
You ever wonder why TED speakers talk... like... this...? It's easier on their voice. I learned this the hard way.
I catalogued my quest to slow down, taking automated transcriptions of my talks and analyzing them using J. Read it here!
(This might also be a way to stealthily remind people I give talks. Both the talks I use as case studies are "staples" of mine, ones where I'm comfortable giving them multiple times. Not all talks work that way- some, like my current property-testing talk, are either too weak to generalize or only apply in a specific context. Those two, though, I really like how they turned out. I'm still gonna tweak them, but I don't have to completely rewrite them from ground up.)
(On a similar note: I've been thinking about the next talks I want to write, since I love both designing talks and giving them. One will probably be an expansion of "Formally Modeling Migrations", so I have an Alloy talk in addition to a TLA+ talk. Another will have to be the crossover project, as that's way too cool to leave to just a post. But I haven't found the right conferences for either of them yet. If you have any ideas, let me know!)
(Yeah this tangent is longer than the actual section. Fight me.)
The Crossover Project
I'm interviewing people who started as traditional engineers and became software engineers. The process of writing the first draft is now underway! So far I've done fourteen interviews. Lots of patterns are appearing! If you want a quick summary, the big themes are going to be
- We are real engineers
- We are not special
- We have a lot to learn and teach.
Right now my biggest gap is that somehow I've managed to not interview a single civil engineer. I have two who promised to do interviews, though. Maybe they'll blow these themes out of the water! Who even knows anymore.
Link: A Cool Game
If this is a newsletter, I should probably be posting links around the web in an effort to pump out more content, right? Here's one: The Deadlock Empire. You learn basic race conditions and deadlock issues by stepping through code snippets and making them break. It's a fun way to spend an hour and learn about how bad computers are.
If you're reading this on the web, you can subscribe here. Updates are once a week. My main website is here.
My new book, Logic for Programmers, is now in early access! Get it here.