Reader Mailbag: June Crunch Edition
Hey everyone! We gotta start with some housekeeping. First, you might have noticed that the newsletter email's changed. Several people informed me that Gmail...
Codebases as communication
Conventionally we communicate programming ideas with talks, papers, and blog posts. But we can also communicate ideas with entire codebases. If someone finds...
How to Memorize a Larger Multiplication Table
This one's going to be a bit off topic. I have a long piece on the history of pattern matching I want to do but this week is really tight work-wise and this...
Technology changes fast
As a teen I regularly read The Daily WTF, a comedy site about bad programming and bad software jobs. Two articles have stuck with me. The first is this...
Update on Learntla and a new writing process
Hey everyone! I realize I should give you all an update on the current learntla progress! So first of all, I've been continuously pushing my work to the...
Software Mise en Place
I am really, really into cooking. In the heady days of 2016 I regularly threw dinner parties for 30+ people. These days I don't hate myself that much, but...
You can automate more than you think
(Sorry this is late! Dealing with COVID.) I have mild ADHD. I can focus on strenuous mental tasks, but I can't handle boring or repetitive work. Even...
The Esotech Lit Gap
I work with a lot of really esoteric technologies, like TLA+, Alloy, J, MiniZinc, and PRISM. Pretty much every non-mainstream technology has a "literature...
Take Back April Fools (also new post)
Hello everyone! So first of all, new post. It's about how I got into microscopy and a bunch of pictures I took that I like. It has nothing to do with tech at...
The Software Iron Triangle
The "iron triangle" of project management is "Cheap, fast, good: choose two". This works on the assumption that quality is a metric while time and money are...
I finally found a use for XML
The Problem When teaching things I like to break code up into a set of small changes, showing the differences between each change. So if I start with //...
That time Indiana almost made π 3.2
Happy Pi Day!1 To celebrate I want to get away from software for a bit and talk about something special. You may have heard the story that the Indiana...
The Parable of the Crow
Hey y'all! Still hard at work on the new learntla version. It's currently about a third of the length of original learntla, which is pretty impressive, given...
Software I'm Thankful For
Last week I read Software I'm Thankful For and it inspired me to do a similar piece. I use a lot of different exotic tools, too, so I think it's a good way...
A Short Treatise on Bugs
First a term: by "treatise", I'm not saying this newsletter is comprehensive, persuasive, or even correct. I'm using it to mean a very specific type of...
Website Haitus, Info on the Learntla Rewrite
Website Haitus Fortunately not depression this time, just a responsibility thing. From the announcement: I’m not letting myself work on software content for...
Why You Should Read "Data and Reality"
Once more: we are not modeling reality, but the way information about reality is processed, by people. — Bill Kent I've got this working theory that you can...
Regexes are Cool and Good
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Then they solve their problem, hooray! Regexes are great! I use...
Software Artifacts and Programming vs Engineering
Hiya everyone! Workshop is all done and I'm alive again. For those of you just joining us, I teach formal methods workshops to companies. Working on a piece...
Please stop falling for conspiracy theories
I'm a pretty gullible person. When I was a kid, my sister told me that there was a monster inside the toilet. For years after I'd flush and then run out of...