Computer Things: YOW Roundup Edition
Hi everybody, Back from YOW! I spent the last two weeks in Australia, giving talks at three separate conferences. I was off but back now. Here's some...
Science Turf War
Conferences I'm speaking at YOW! I'll be presenting Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+ in Sydney, Melbourne, AND Brisbane. If you're coming to one of...
New Essay! (Also Workshop Field Notes)
Workshop Improvements Apologies for not sending anything on Monday; I was doing a workshop for Facebook! I had a blast, but I'm usually dead by the end of...
A few smaller updates
Ethnography of antipatterns We all can think of reasons why it's bad to use single-letter variable names in most contexts. Why people do it anyway? I usually...
What is a "beautiful" proof?
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
Over the past month my Fedora installation got increasingly unstable- hardware glitches, randomly losing internet, not entering sleep mode. Yesterday I got...
Canonical Examples
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...