13 May 2025
There’s been an explosion of tools for software development. At the same time there’s a growing sense that software quality isn’t what it used to be—or that developers these days don’t understand what it takes to be a “real” programmer, whatever that means. I’m not that old, but I have some old-school tool preferences. Some tools I really like; in other cases I feel that by not adopting particular habits, I’ve gained or retained an edge over others in the software development space.
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6 Feb 2025
LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system hamstrung by a few decades-old decisions and some… ahem… questionable design decisions. Nevertheless, its ability to typeset technical documents remains unmatched, and it enjoys wide support across STEM fields. Learning LaTeX is a worthy use of your time, if you intend to pursue a career in science.
This is meant as a short and simple how-to guide for learning LaTeX. It is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather serve as a guide of where to look to get the information you need to know. It is organized as a problem → solution mapping.
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14 Dec 2024
Emacs has come a long way in the past decade. This is meant as a guide to anyone who’s been using stock or near-stock Emacs for some years and wants a quick update on the new shiny stuff that comes bundled with Emacs.
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21 Nov 2024
Should a programming language be powerful and let a programmer do a lot, or should it be safe and protect the programmer from bad mistakes? Contrary to what the title insinuates, these are not diametrically opposed attributes. Nevertheless, this is the mindset that underlies notions such as, “macros, manual memory management, etc. are power tools—they’re not supposed to be safe.” If safety and power are not necessarily opposed, why does this notion persist?
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22 Oct 2024
In my last post I described how I made a very fast BF interpreter. Well, there’s a lot more speed to be had with an optimizing compiler. This post is a write-up of my assignment for a compilers class, so the post a little rougher than normal.
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15 Oct 2024
I recently wrote about using first-class functions to help make a BF interpreter. This is a follow-up post to describe a nifty solution to a tricky problem that made my program go 2–5× faster and put it about on-par with an interpreter written in pure C.
A basic interpreter works by walking down the AST and evaluating nodes recursively: when the interpreter encounters an expression, it dispatches on the type of expression to decide how to perform the evaluation. Here’s the key insight to get a massive speed bump with very little effort: that dispatch is expensive and can be performed ahead-of-time. We can walk through the code once and precompute all the dispatching work.
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26 Sep 2024
I got to visit the Stasi museum in Berlin this week, and it gave me a newfound appreciation for why it’s important to resist surveillance. Interestingly, surveillance is not exclusively limited to one kind of government: it can appeal to both left- and right-wing governments, and corporations in the digital age use surveillance to make money. In every form, surveillance is evil and must be resisted.
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11 Sep 2024
We’re going to be writing a BF compiler for a class I’m in. Last night I threw together a little interpreter for the program in about an hour; it doesn’t do input—that should be easy to add—but it’s enough to handle some benchmarks for the language, albeit slowly. You can see my repository on Codeberg for the source code.
I needed one function to do two closely related jobs—the logic was identical, but some parameters needed to change. Fortunately, first-class functions in your language make it trivial to parameterize your programs in elegant ways.
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19 Aug 2024
I started using the Zsh a few years ago and I’ve liked its completion features. I tried out Oh-my-zsh for a while and I liked the stock Robby Russel prompt. It gave me all the information I cared about: the status of the last command, current directory, and the state of the current Git repository.
However, I didn’t like how slow Oh-my-zsh was making my shell startup. This mattered especially, I think, because my Emacs config would fire up a shell on startup to read the ENV so it could configure some language servers properly. Irked at how long stuff was taking, I set out to build my own.
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6 Aug 2024
Today I learned about using zero-knowledge proofs in the context of passwords. These are my rough-and-ready notes from reading. Apparently OpenSSL has an implementation of the SRP algorithm.
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