Just a place to gather my thoughts and opinions about programming, science, and life. I can't promise all of it is interesting, but I can definitely promise all of it is nerdy.
Look at me being all highfalutin and referencing “The Bard” when I ought to admit this is more an “Oops!… I Did It Again” situation! I promised myself I wouldn’t and yet, here it is, I wrote yet another JONESFORTH clone. I have no excuse. Well, I kinda do. I was nerd sniped on discord. See, what happened was this: I built all previous clones to WebAssembly so Paul Tarvydas whether I considered…
We live in an era with “data is king” and that’s great. Unfortunately, data is hard to interpret. Edward Tufte has written phenomenal books on “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”. In them, he coined the term “data-ink ratio” and introduced other best practices.
Or How do you Slice and Dice Data?
I put machine learning in your machine learning
In real-world software, layers accumulate like archeological stratigraphy. I recently cooked up a little utility which ended up touching layers spanning several decades. It all started when I found the official recommendation from AWS to create a python layer underwhelming.
5/19/25 update: See my Zig NYC #4 slides
I like Zig because it encourages me to pay attention to details when I use it. I have recently come up with an interesting pattern in two separate use cases. I think it warrants a quick blog post. The pattern is a curious mix of abstraction levels. On the one hand, it’s high-level because it prefers Zig’s std.ArrayList over the lower level std.mem.Allocator. On the other, it’s low-level because it…
Or How Much is ever Enough?
As this blog shows, I am deeply interested in interpreters. I find the meta nature of programs that run programs fascinating. That said, I am also too lazy to care for the fiddly bookkeeping needed to write a robust parser. That makes FORTH’s complete lack of syntax particularly appealing (look ma, no parser)!
Previous posts highlight my interest in (obsession with?) interpreters. I keep marveling at techniques people have come up with over the years to make our interactions with computers feel conversational. I was recently reminded of Guy Steele’s seminal Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO article. Around the same time, I came across old release notes for Clang 13.0.0 announcing, among other things, a musttail…