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...

2022 In Review

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I originally made this newsletter to tell people when I updated my blog.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....

Software Moves

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...

Snippet Praxis

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

August 2, 2022

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

Information camouflage

July 26, 2022

About a thing that makes finding some information really hard

On Metafiles

July 19, 2022

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

July 13, 2022

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

July 6, 2022

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!

July 1, 2022

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

June 15, 2022

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

May 26, 2022

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

May 16, 2022

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

May 3, 2022

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

April 25, 2022

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

April 22, 2022

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

April 18, 2022

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

April 12, 2022

(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

April 4, 2022

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)

April 1, 2022

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

March 29, 2022

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

March 21, 2022

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

March 14, 2022

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

March 8, 2022

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

March 1, 2022

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

February 21, 2022

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

February 14, 2022

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"

February 7, 2022

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...