About
My name’s Ashton Wiersdorf. I recently graduated with a degree in computer science from Brigham Young University. I’ll be starting a PhD at the University of Utah in the fall of 2022. I’ve sung with the BYU Men’s Chorus and I play the piano. Other hobbies include swimming and hiking—Utah has some of the most diverse landscape anywhere in the US: from dense forests to barren desert. If you visit, I highly recommend checking out some of the national parks.
I have been married to my wife Sarah since 2018; we met when we were in high school and she’s been my best friend ever since. You can see her blog here. We became parents in the summer of 2021 and couldn’t be happier!
I served a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany. Consequently, I speak fluent German and have a great appetite for German food. My wife and I were able to visit Berlin for a few months in 2019. If you’re interested in visiting Europe, Berlin is a must.
I’m a command line addict; most of my work is done with Emacs. Over the past year or two I’ve made some extensive modifications to my configuration. You can get my .emacs config files on my GitHub repo.
This blog is primarily where I’ll post about research, school, and programming. I’m studying programming languages, though my interests are not strictly constrained to any one field. I like literature and philosophy, so there will be the occasional book review that I’ll post under my personal section. I change my mind a lot; I’m still learning, so things written here should not be understood as an immutable reflection of my opinions.
Contact
I’m currently fascinated with the Matrix protocol, and it’s now my preferred mode of contact. It’s a little like email, except it’s encrypted and more extensible.
My Matrix handle is: @varsderk:lambdaland.org
You should be able to connect via the Matrix.to redirection service. If you don’t have a client downloaded, you can use the in-browser Element client. It will let you make a free account if you don’t already have one.
I don’t post my email on my blog directly, lest I get plagued with spam until the end of the internet. Since it’s probably the easiest way for most people to contact me, you can find it on my résumé.
You can also find me on these platforms, though I might not answer quickly:
Colophon
This blog is built by Hugo, and the theme is a custom fork of Anatole. It’s hosted on GitHub Pages.
Most of the time I write my blog in Emacs. Occasionally I’ll edit on mobile, but most of the finishing work is done with Emacs on my personal machine. I render locally and push the rendered files up to my GitHub pages repo.