To my Jewish friends and followers: I’m grieving with you today. I know the neighborhood where Tree of Life synagogue sits – it’s a quiet, well-off, slightly Bohemian ‘burb with a lot of techies living in it. I’m not Jewish myself, but I figured out a long time ago that any society which abuses its… Continue reading On the Squirrel Hill shooting
Month: October 2018
How to write narrative documentation
The following is a very lightly edited version of email I wrote to my apprentice Ian Bruene after he wrote documentation for his new Kommandant project that was, alas, as awful as I generally expect from programmers. I’m not training Ian for mere coding competence; he’s too talented for that and anyway I have higher… Continue reading How to write narrative documentation
Reposurgeon’s Excellent Journey and the Waning of Python
Time to make it public and official. The entire reposurgeon suite (not just repocutter and repomapper, which have already been ported) is changing implementation languages from Python to Go. Reposurgeon itself is about 50% translated, with pretty good unit-test coverage. Three of my collaborators on the project (Daniel Brooks, Eric Sunshine, and Edward Cree) have… Continue reading Reposurgeon’s Excellent Journey and the Waning of Python
Rule-swarm attacks can outdo deep reasoning
It not news to readers of this blog that I like to find common tactics and traps in programming that don’t have names and name them. I don’t only do this because it’s fun. When you have named a thing you give your brain permission to reason about it as a conceptual unit. Bad jargon… Continue reading Rule-swarm attacks can outdo deep reasoning