Archive (Page 3) • Computer Things • Buttondown

What can you code up in an hour?

Fast programming is a powerful skill.

Formalizing Stability and Resilience Properties

Predicate Logic for Programmers: Status Report

A 2000-word piece on why I haven't yet finished a different piece

Hype Cycles Aren't "Gaslighting" You

I promised an update on the logic book today but I haven't done a spite write in a while and oh boy a new one is just raring to go. Update is queued up to be...

Teaching Implication Better

February 27, 2023

Hello everyone! It's finally March, or at least close enough to March for my purposes. First thing, we're a month off from April Cools! April cools is a...

Code review vs code proofreading

February 20, 2023

What if the problem with code review is that we're doing it wrong?

Programming AIs worry me

February 16, 2023

For some inane reason, Github classifies me as a "major open source maintainer", which means I get a free copilot subscription.1 I've been using it for a...

Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

February 13, 2023

But they are victims of complex societal factors that are beyond their control

Creatively Misusing TLA+

February 7, 2023

Five not-quite-normal uses

Improve your debugging by asking broad questions

February 2, 2023

Another form of divide-and-conquer

January 30, 2023

I've tried to write a blog post on tag systems for years now. Literally years, I think I first started drafting it out in 2018 or so? The problem is that...

New Workshop, Some Data-ish Pipeline Tricks

January 23, 2023

Lots of admin stuff today! First, we have a new blogpost, the full version of the complexity preview I shared last week. I'm also announcing a new TLA+...

Funny Programming Languages

January 19, 2023

One of the weirdest and most wonderful things about people is that they can make a joke out of anything. For any human discipline there's people making jokes...

Use the Wrong Tool for the Job

January 16, 2023

I've recently been real fascinated by the topic of complexity and what keeps us from keeping software simple. The wider net likes to blame "lazy programmers"...

In Defense of Testing Mocks

January 9, 2023

Computer Things: 2021 Edition It's over a year late, I know, but the 2021 Newsletter collection is now available to purchase as a PDF. 70,000 words, 250...

Microfeatures I'd like to see in more languages

January 5, 2023

There are roughly three classes of language features: Features that the language is effectively designed around, such that you can't add it after the fact....

Why Modeling Finds Bugs (Without Model-Checking)

January 2, 2023

Just the process of writing a model will improve your software designs.

Bugs that literally cost money

December 21, 2022

How much does a software bug cost a company? Well that's a messy question. It depends on the type of bug, the broken behavior, the type of company, etc. And...

December 19, 2022

Happy end of 2022! It's been a busy year personally and professionally, one of the most productive (on both fronts!) in a long time. Not that you'd be able...

Universal SE Topics

December 13, 2022

Resources that someone (nose goes) needs to write

Making ChatGPT Useful

December 7, 2022

Lower your expectations and AI will thrive

I am disappointed by dynamic typing

November 29, 2022

They have potential to be more than "no static types", but that hasn't happened.

Let's Prove Leftpad; Content Aggregation

November 16, 2022

Hi everyone! First of all, I published a new blog post. It's an explanation of my Let's Prove Leftpad project. Give it a read! Now because I can't in good...

Why do we call it "boilerplate code?"

November 14, 2022

Etymology is fun!

Notes on Every Strangeloop 2022 Talk I Attended

November 2, 2022

I originally made this newsletter to tell people when I updated my blog. Then it grew into the abomination it is today. Anyway, I just updated my blog....

November 1, 2022

Verbing patterns

Software Isomorphisms

October 25, 2022

SUPRISE MATH LESSON

Teaching Accidental and Essential Complexity

October 18, 2022

So you may know that I'm teaching a 1-day TLA+ workshop in December (just 10 slots left!) This is unlike my normal workshops because it's only 1 day and for...

What a Wedding Taught Me About Software Engineering

October 12, 2022

I'm too jetlagged to resist silly clickbait

I am a SQL Injection Attack

October 4, 2022

Recently I've been very interested in "meatspace models", where you explain a CS concept in terms of the real world. It's the monad is a burrito gag except...

September 27, 2022

Copypasting from stuff is A Good Idea

New Article, "The Five Minute Feedback Fix"

September 19, 2022

Hi everyone! I know I said there was no newsletter this week, but that doesn't mean no new content! Last year I was approached by The ReadMe Project,...

On the benefits of humanities in software engineering

September 14, 2022

Read More Boring Poetry

Data Invariants

September 7, 2022

Asserts But Fancy

Giving Names to Things

August 30, 2022

Naming things is hard. Naming things that have never been named is harder.

Why do arrays start at 0?

August 23, 2022

It's not the reason you think. No, it's not that reason either.

I have complicated feelings about TDD

August 16, 2022

They're not all good and not all bad

Excel is Pretty Dang Cool

August 12, 2022

It's like discovering a treasure chest under my kitchen sink

Search less, browse more

Why you should browse more documentation instead of just searching for specific answers

Information camouflage

About a thing that makes finding some information really hard

A metafile is a file that represents multiple possible files. The most common type of metafile in use is the template file: <p>I passed in {number}</p>...

Six Programming Languages I'd Like to See

A few weird ideas for programming languages I came up with that it'd be "really" "cool" if someone made (wink)

Beyond the Four-Document Model

Been a while! Now that learntla is out, I can get back to life. Exercising, eating, sleeping, and most importantly, updating this newsletter. Word of...

The new learntla is now online!

tl;dr: online TLA+ manual/advanced techniques/examples here. TLA+ is a tool for testing abstract software designs. I first stumbled on it in 2016 and found...

Updates on Learntla

Fifteen days left Hi everyone! Been a couple of weeks since the last email. As mentioned, I took June off from weekly newsletter to work on the new version...

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...