About Me #

I’m Ashton Wiersdorf, and I’m a PhD student at the University of Utah studying programming languages with Ben Greenman. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. Outside of academia I have worked as a software engineer, mostly focused on back-end development.

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 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.

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.

Colophon #

This blog is built by Hugo, and the theme is a modified version of hugo-book. The body font is Valkyrie, the headings are Hermes Maia, and the monospace font is a personal customization of Iosevka that I call Iosevka Output. This blog is hosted on GitHub Pages.

For analytics I use Goat Counter which doesn’t track any personal data. It’s basically just a way for me to see what’s popular and what’s not and so I can tell if something hits the front page of HN when I wasn’t looking.

I write my blog in Emacs. I use ox-hugo to export from org-mode to Hugo-friendly Markdown. I used to use Hugo’s built-in org-mode handler, but it messed things up like apostrophes and didn’t handle some other formatting as I wanted it to. The ox-hugo library does a much better job.

This is the third iteration of my blog style. Previously I’ve run blogs with Ghost and Jekyll. I moved to Jekyll from Ghost because I wanted a lighter-weight static site, and I moved from Jekyll to Hugo for the lovely themes and some of the more advanced capabilities it offers.