Computer Things

Monads and Transducers are Literally 100% The Same Thing

June 15, 2020

No Newsletter Next Week I promised one last week but the Alloy workshop took way too much out of me. Since I'm doing another workshop next week, I'm just...

Some Ranting About Examples

June 2, 2020

Delayed newsletter next week I'm doing the Alloy workshop on Monday and will have zero energy after that, so the newsletter will be out by Tuesday at the...

Defects are not the fault of programmers

May 27, 2020

Sorry this one is late! I've been having a rough time lately, which I think is pretty normal right now for everyone. But I'm doing a bit better now and hope...

Workshop Innovations and New Website Essay

May 18, 2020

Office hours What I'm thinking of doing is office hours every two weeks, alternating between an evening slot and a morning slot. So this week let's do office...

If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

May 15, 2020

This essay says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should "ban inheritance completely". You see these arguments a lot, as well as things like...

New Essay: In Praise of AutoHotKey

May 12, 2020

No office hours this week Still thinking through how to best do office hours. I think based on attendance it'd probably be more comfortable to do something...

Rage Against the God Machine

May 8, 2020

Content warning: mental illness, depression, abuse, PTSD, stuff like that. If you're sensitive to these topics you may want to skip this one. On Wednesday I...

How I Write Talks

May 4, 2020

New Workshop Given the interest in the previous Alloy workshop, I've opened up a second day on June 22nd. Same discount applies, [redacted] for 500 off. It's...

New Essay, Office Hours, and a short essay

April 27, 2020

Workshop Sold Out The Alloy workshop is now sold out. Dang, that was fast. If you're still interested in this, please add yourself to the waitlist. If enough...

This Newsletter is Too Popular

April 21, 2020

New Talk My Deconstruct talk, "What we can Learn from Software History", is now out! It covers why studying history so important and what it looks like to...

Making Illegal States Unrepresentable

April 17, 2020

I have opinions on this Okay so the saying is "make illegal states unrepresentable". The meaning is that we should structure programs in a way it such that a...

Announcing Alloydocs, updates on major projects

April 13, 2020

Alloydocs It's finally ready! Almost 13,000 words of Alloy reference, techniques, and pitfalls. There's still a lot of work to do when people inevitably...

A Very Brief Intro to Formal Methods (aka my job)

April 6, 2020

Office Hours Worked pretty well last time, so let's do it again! This Friday, 11 AM CST, Zoom Room [redacted], password is [redacted]. Not sure if this is...

What's the Most Expensive Software Per Byte?

April 2, 2020

Is it 1 dollar/mb? 10 dollars/mb? 100? 100,000?

Language Warts and Vim Trix

March 30, 2020

New(ish post) Last week I published a new post called 10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages and forgot to share it here. In that time we've...

Please don't write your documentation in Markdown

March 23, 2020

Please don't write your documentation in Markdown. Please. I'm begging you. Markdown is tolerable for short documentation, like a readme.md. Past that, it's...

Special Purpose Languages

March 18, 2020

Greetings from the end of the world! Sorry things are late, I had writers ablockalypse. Remote workshops All the conferences I was supposed to go to are now...

On Customization

March 11, 2020

A couple letters back I talked about how mental models don't scale. If you heavily customize the environment to your needs, it'll be hard for other people to...

Online Workshops, Project Updates, New Post

March 9, 2020

Back from vacation! Turns out I'm bad at vacationing. Anyway, quick update on projects: Crossover Project: I recently gave a 10 minute lightning talk draft...

The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition

March 5, 2020

Yes I know I'm technically on vacation but if I go too long without writing I die from a witch's curse and I don't want to work on longform projects For...

On Scaling Mental Models

February 24, 2020

No Newsletter Next Week I'll be on vacation in the Caribbean, sipping drinks and juggling for Hermit crabs. The Actual Thing I'm a vim user. I've used Vim...

Donald Knuth Was Framed

February 22, 2020

YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...

Happy Precedence Day!

February 17, 2020

Happy precedence day! (For my non-American followers, it's a pun on a national holiday we got today) New Consulting Offering I'm now available to do paid...

New Essay: Feature Interaction Bugs

February 5, 2020

Read it here! This has gone through some fits and starts, so it's finally good to get it out. I sketched out the first draft in 2018. 2018! ps y'all are gr8

Project updates, request for help, braindump

February 3, 2020

Update on Major Projects I've finally, finally started drafting out the crossover project. And only two months late! Right now the outline is almost a...

On Emulation

January 28, 2020

Last week I said that I had some thoughts on "emulation" but hadn't yet hammered them out. So today I'm gonna hammer them out. I might eventually polish this...

New Essay: The Business Case For Formal Methods

January 22, 2020

New essay at the site! The Business Case for Formal Methods is a primer on the financial benefits of using FM, plus case studies and a demo. It's a...

A Totally Polished and not-at-all half-baked Take on Static vs Dynamic Typing

January 20, 2020

I'm back from Madfest! Since this is a newsletter computer things and not a newsletter about juggling things, I won't say anything about it. Except I got to...

Three Ways Juggling is Like Programming

January 17, 2020

I'm going to my first ever juggling convention this weekend! If any of you are in Madison, hit me up. Not sure if I'll be able to get away from Madfest, but...

New Essay, Intentional Errors, and a TLA+ CLI

January 13, 2020

New Essay I haven't posted any essays on formal methods in a while, so let's start of the new year right: Hypermodeling Hyperproperties When we design...

Bill Kentstravaganza

January 10, 2020

Bill Kent is one of the unsung greats of software engineering. I get why Data and Reality is obscure: the 2nd edition is out of circulation and the 3rd...

Updates on the Too-Many Projects

January 6, 2020

Happy first week of the new year! Wanted to give some quick updates on the projects I'm working on, so you know what to expect from me in the coming few...

Back up your arguments plz

January 3, 2020

A couple days ago I read Putting devs before users: how frameworks destroyed web performance, a rant about why the web is so slow. You don't have to read...

On Marketing Formal Methods

December 30, 2019

Hi everyone! Back from vacation! Spent most of it cooking. Check out this beauty: Bottom layer is a dark chocolate and peanut butter ganache, top layer is a...

Why Python is my Favorite Language

December 26, 2019

Merry Hannukah! I've been trying very hard not to think about anything tech related this week, but also want to keep to a weekly schedule of newsletters....

Computer Things: YOW Roundup Edition

December 16, 2019

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

November 25, 2019

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)

November 22, 2019

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

November 15, 2019

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?

November 11, 2019

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

November 8, 2019

Over the past month my Fedora installation got increasingly unstable- hardware glitches, randomly losing internet, not entering sleep mode. Yesterday I got...

Canonical Examples

November 4, 2019

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

October 30, 2019

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

October 28, 2019

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

October 21, 2019

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

October 16, 2019

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

October 14, 2019

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

October 11, 2019

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

October 9, 2019

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

October 4, 2019

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...