I started my PhD program about a year ago. In my first year I have:
It’s been a lot of work, and there’s been a lot of stress. I’m in a much better place now than when I started, and over all I’m happy where I’m at and where I’m headed.
...Here’s a nifty Emacs workflow for doing a project-wide search-and-replace on steroids. While I do use refactor tools that come with language servers,1 sometimes those aren’t enough. Consider the case where you not only need to change the name of a function, but also e.g. need to swap the order of two of its arguments. Or you’ve broken one function out into two that need to be chained together. Whatever—there are plenty of ways where the IDE won’t be able to do everything that you need. Enter: Emacs.
...I hiked up Desolation Trail with Scott Wiersdorf. It had rained a little bit the night before, so the trail was neither dusty nor muddy—perfect for hiking.
Figure 1: Hike overview
Lots of pretty plants on the way.
Figure 2: This flower is called Arrow Leaf
Figure 3: Some pretty ground cover
Figure 4: A neat old tree that got split
...There are a bunch of different ways of writing a macro in Racket. There are also some tricky things around phases to keep in mind. This is to help me keep them all straight.
This form:
(define-syntax-rule (foo args ...) (use args ...))
is equivalent to:
(define-syntax foo
(syntax-rules ()
([foo args ...] (use args ...))))
Which, is in turn equivalent to:
(define-syntax foo
(λ (stx)
(syntax-case stx ()
[(gensymed-foo args ...) #'(use args ...)]))) ; gensymed-foo is like foo but doesn't match in the template
because syntax-rules expands to syntax-case with some fancy wrapping around it.
I recently made an update to how I build my blog. I like writing my posts with Org-mode because it provides a richer markup language than Markdown. Plus, more Emacs = more good. Hugo has support for Org files, but there was a problem with the RSS feed generation: all of my posts written in Org got truncated at some point. I don’t know if the fault lies with Hugo itself or with some problem in the theme I use—whatever it was, I don’t have the time right now to debug that and submit a good bug report or a fix. Instead, I’m using the ox-hugo org-mode exporter, so I still can write my posts with Org, but then let Emacs export them to Markdown for Hugo to process.
...I believe computer science plays as integral of a part to a well-rounded liberal arts education as does mathematics and linguistics. Why? A liberal arts education is designed to help you think in new and better ways. Computer science teaches novel ways of thinking, reasoning, and approaching problems that are hard to get anywhere else.
I took a class on pedagogy when I encountered this puzzle. I answered the question easily, and I caught myself using reasoning patterns from work in programming coming to the forefront.
...I recently managed to get access to my Outlook email from Emacs. This took some doing as my university had disabled app passwords. I consider Outlook to be harmful, but inasmuch as companies and schools continue to enforce OAUTH-only authentication with email systems, it is good to find workarounds.
This is how I set up email sending/receiving on my computer running macOS with DavMail. I also use mbsync (confusingly also known as isync) to actually fetch my email, and mu/mu4e to index and read mail. Douglas Rumbaugh has an awesome blog post that I followed to get this working. You should read that. This will mostly be my specific configuration settings as well as some tips and tricks.
...Some years ago I came across a blog post that described programmers as being in one of three camps. It's a fun, short post, so I encourage you to go read that real quick, but the gist of it is that programmers generally fall into one of three categories according to what they primarily value:
The author of the post talks a little bit about the tension between the camps. I won't reproduce it here, but it can be amusing, so you should give it a read.
...My grandfather G William Wiersdorf passed away Monday morning. He was 82 and survived COVID, a decades-long existence with MS, and World War II. While his health wasn't the best, none of us were expecting this. You can read his obituary here.
UPDATE 2023-03-18: I've translated my grandpa's obituary into German. Here it is:
G William "Bill" Wiersdorf verstarb friedlich am 13. März 2023 mit seiner liebevollen Frau Kathy an seiner Seite.
...I once worked as a part of a company with four employees, all of us programmers. We formed a sort of daughter company with a bigger—though still modest-sized—company that handled our payroll and whatnot. Our work directly helped the parent company, but we were organizationally independent development-wise. I really liked working with that small team: we had a one-hour meeting each week to plan out our work, and a short, casual stand-up each morning to get things rolling. Almost all my time was spent building features and squishing bugs. I got a lot of really good feedback on all my pull-requests, as everyone there really cared about making a good-quality product.
...