Praise for the pragmatic third camp

16 Mar 2023

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:

1. Applied mathematicians, who appreciate elegant solutions to problems. Program execution on von Neumann machines is incidental. These programmers like high-level languages and mathematically correct reasoning about programs.

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Grandpa

15 Mar 2023

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.

Metric Worship, or: How a bad manager wrecked a (small) company

21 Feb 2023

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.

Changes in Career Aspirations

3 Feb 2023

It's interesting for me to reflect on how my aspirations have changed as I've grown up. When I was a little kid I wanted to be a computer programmer like my daddy. I wanted to have my own cubicle and a work station and write Perl programs all day long in Emacs.

There was a phase where I had to shake my head at that—a cubicle-dweller? Seriously? After experiencing some open-office work spaces, the shoulder-high walls afforded a privacy and sound muffling that any hipster coder would be envious of.

What is a type system, really?

23 Jan 2023

Background #

This is a question I’ve been wrestling with for a little bit. My first experience with a type system was with Java, and I didn’t like it. It just felt like an annoying constraint on the kinds of programs I could write. I was coming from Perl, which sports weak dynamic typing, so Java’s rigidity came as a bit of a shock.

After Java I learned some C, which too has types. C’s types are different from Java’s in a big way: in C they’re really just directives to the compiler on how to interpret some bytes. “Everything is just void *” is kind of true. In C, bytes can be interpreted however you wish.

Make an Emacs Buffer Open the Way You Want

27 Dec 2022

Are you tired of having a particular buffer pop open in the wrong direction? Do you wish, for example, that the Racket REPL buffer showed up on the right in a vertical split, rather than below in a horizontal one? Look no further. I give you, display-buffer-alist:

(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist
             '("\\*Racket REPL </>\\*"
               (display-buffer-in-direction)
               (direction . right)))

That little snippet will make sure when you hit C-c C-k inside of a racket-mode buffer, a REPL will pop up on the right-side instead of on the bottom. I find that much more comfortable to use.

Christmas 2022

25 Dec 2022

This year I discovered the profound joy of giving toys to a little girl. Our daughter is beginning to babble and walk, and nothing has brought me more happiness than playing with her and watching her grow in her capabilities. She's still young enough that she has no clue as to what is going on, but she did like getting some new toys wrapped in paper and bows! Christmas is so much better giving presents to your kids than it is getting presents as a kid.

What I Like in a Font for Code

5 Dec 2022

I’m well aware that I may have a bit of an obsession with fonts. I don’t think that’s too unusual for someone who works in tech, however. Sites like Programming Fonts exist to let people test drive and compare a bunch of different fonts. Just for fun, I thought I’d write up some of the features I look for in a programming font that I’ve come to deliberately pick out.

Never surrender your password

22 Nov 2022

In a study that Ars Technica reported on, researchers found that an alarming number of computer repair technicians snooped through clients’ devices—and female clients were way more likely to have their data accessed. Yikes!

I once had to take my laptop to get some repairs done. The TAB key on my 2016 MacBook Pro had started glitching, and that wasn’t going to fly when I was working on code and needed my tab completions and app switching to be seamless. I took my laptop to the Apple-authorized repair service at my school. The surly technician confirmed my warranty and asked me to fill out an intake form for my computer.

Continuations—what are they?

17 Nov 2022

I had a friend ask me what continuations are, and why they’re useful. There’s a ton of literature about continuations; this is just a simple example meant to showcase something small and hopefully grokkable.