Computer Things

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...

Regexes are Cool and Good

January 31, 2022

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

January 25, 2022

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

January 11, 2022

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...

The Outside View

January 3, 2022

In Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People, Maciej Pinboard nee Cegłowski talks about analyzing AI risk with the perspective of the "outside...

2nd Annual End-of-Year Essay Retrospective

December 27, 2021

Last year I rolled up the newsletter into an ebook and gave my thoughts on every published blogpost. I haven't gotten around to making the 2021 Computer...

Sup Nerds, We Doin' a Mailbag

December 20, 2021

First some good personal news: I did a hiatus over the summer due to severe depression issues. Well, I finally got into an intensive outpatient program,...

Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

December 14, 2021

New Post: ADTs in TLA+ Using Abstract Data Types in TLA+. It's an adaptation of part of my TLAConf talk. It's also a lot more advanced than most of the...

A better explanation of the monty hall problem

December 9, 2021

I know I said no newsletter this week but this just hit me and it's small enough to write up so I'm fitting it in. The Monty Hall problem is a famous...

New Post: Alloy 6: It's About Time

November 29, 2021

Read it here! https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/alloy6/ Features my first attempts at using vector graphic diagrams to explain things better, like this:...

Principles of Software Evangelism

November 22, 2021

My job these days is researching exotic software technologies and selling them to companies, which means I'm a software evangelist. And because I literally...

Alloy 6 First Impressions

November 15, 2021

So a couple of weeks ago I wrote Finding Alloy's Niche, where I said I wasn't expecting the new Alloy 6 release to change all that much. It came out last...

Documentation could be so much better

November 10, 2021

A year or so back I wrote the newsletter post Don't use Markdown for documentation, where I complained about its lack of extensibility and cross-project...

Finding Alloy's Niche

November 1, 2021

(This gets a little rambly, I'm trying to figure out some stuff and thought it'd be nice to share my thinking process.) I've been thinking a lot about Alloy...

A Very Brief SPLASH Writeup

October 25, 2021

Sup nerds! Last week the SPLASH conference— the main academic conference for programming language research— came to town. I decided on a whim to buy a ticket...

The Myth of Self-Documenting Code

October 18, 2021

One of the weirdest things about software engineering is how many people hate comments. Like actually hate. There are influential people out there who say...

Defense in Depth is actually a good thing

October 14, 2021

So my TLAConf talk is out and I was gonna talk about technique research but then I saw this tweet and knew I had to rant about it: If after-release testing...

New Essay and Thoughts on Clickfarm

October 11, 2021

New Essay: How to Solve the Sudoku Puzzle with programming New essay up! How to Solve the Sudoku Puzzle with programming. This one is a little conceptual, so...

Jewmain Driven Design

October 4, 2021

Sup nerds, I'm back from Strange Loop! I have a million ideas I want to write about now, but I'll stick to one of the lighter, sillier ones. Based on a claim...

Optimizing State Spaces with Combinatorics

September 27, 2021

I'm preparing my talk for the TLA+ Conference this week. I asked around about intermediate stuff people wanted me to cover and there was a lot of interest in...

There Was No Formal Methods Winter

September 20, 2021

Over the weekend, I read the question Is the Formal Methods Winter About to End on Lobsters: Formal methods (theorem proving, model checking, static...

How ACOUP made me a better programmer

September 14, 2021

Hey nerds, I'm back! Still not all that recovered from mental health garbage, but turns out writing is a big part of my mental health, so stopping that for a...

Hiatus

August 16, 2021

Hi everyone, My depression has gotten a lot worse in the past month and it's seriously disrupted my ability to work. I'm taking steps to handle it, but in...

Art vs Engineering

August 9, 2021

I'm finally (finally!) working on a new version of the Are We Really Engineers talk, which has got me once again thinking about the differences between...

Algorithm Monocultures

August 2, 2021

A while back I got really into "corporate blogs". Why are they so soulless? Why do they all sound the same? I asked a friend had managed one of these blogs,...

I ****ing hate Science

July 19, 2021

I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...

Program Spaces and Interesting Counterexamples

July 12, 2021

Okay so let's say I have a function f and ask you to figure out what it is. Input's a list of integers, output is one integer. You gotta figure it out by...

10 Misconceptions about Formal Methods

July 5, 2021

Whole lotta talk about formal methods last week. Moshe Vardi dropped an ACM piece, Jean Yang wrote an essay, and Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky frontpaged Hacker...

What is a "Specification"?

June 29, 2021

What is a specification? The most popular testing library in Ruby is called RSpec, and uses the terminology of Behavior-Driven Development, where tests are...

Physical vs Logical Time

June 21, 2021

There's nothing I'm rarin' to share so I figured I'd talk about a concept in verification I see a lot but haven't seen explicitly discussed anywhere. I don't...

Comment the Why *and* the What

June 14, 2021

People say "comment the why, not the what", the idea being that the code should be self-documenting and the comments should only be a last resort for...

Designing Software with Predicate Logic

June 10, 2021

One reason I like teaching is it helps me understand things better. This came up in a couple different ways while working on the new book, and I'm too...

Users are Nondeterministic Agents of Chaos

June 7, 2021

New Post: Clever vs Insightful Code I shared an early version with the newsletter some time back, and now the final version is done! This one is less...

Predicate Logic For Programmers

May 31, 2021

May is finally, finally over. This was one of the roughest months both jobwise and lifewise in recent memory. But now all my deadlines are over, I'm fully...

Scaffolding TLA+

May 20, 2021

I'm in the process of updating my TLA+ workshop for my class next week.1 Every time I run it I get new ideas on what to improve. After April's class, one of...

New Essay, some thoughts on method vs process

May 18, 2021

No Newsletter Next Week I hate to do this twice in three weeks, but I have a TLA+ workshop next Monday. A Brief Introduction to Esolangs Two pieces of...

Esolangs!

May 4, 2021

No Newsletter next week I have some real life stuff going on and also a secret project deadline. I'd still like to make time for the newsletter, but it's...

Can Formal Methods Succeed where UML Failed?

April 30, 2021

Last Tuesday's piece Why UML "Really" Died went viral. I'm glad that people enjoyed it, and I also was happy to use all that fallow research, but something's...

Why UML "Really" Died

April 27, 2021

There's this post going around the internet called Has UML died without anyone noticing?, In the piece, Ernesto Garbarino says that UML was killed by...