Hello, it’s me again. Coming at you from the wee hours of the morning. YES YES I KNOW that I owe you a 2025-in-review. And I know that it’s very nearly July, which is the latest one yet. But I have a good excuse. It’s a fresh baby! And even better, my son has VERY RECENTLY learned how to sleep. Which means I don’t need to be around all night just in case he starts YELLING. This is a very nice…
When I was young, all of the old people I knew would complain about how quickly the years went past. Now that I am less young than I was (but then again, who isn’t?), I find myself remarking on just how dang quickly the years seem to be going past! Isn’t there a speed limit or something? Where is the gruff, underappreciated traffic cop for the annals of time when you need him? In fact, he seems…
Some things, like getting a job, can be put off indefinitely. Others, like paying taxes, cannot. Writing a yearly review turns out to be in this second category; not only did I promise myself I’d have this post out in the first two weeks of the year, I also promised my wife the same. And so here we are, on the 14th, which is about as late as possible as one might be able to pretend such a thing is…
Happy days and happy news: it’s done. After a year of work, I’m thrilled to announce the completion my new book, Certainty by Construction . Certainty by Construction is a book on doing mathematics and software design in the proof assistant Agda, which is the language Haskell wants to be when it grows up. The book is part Agda primer, introduction to abstract algebra, and algorithm design manual,…
2022 is coming to a close, which means it’s time for my annual look back at the year, telling the stories and coming to realize that I didn’t accomplish many of the things I said I was going to. But that’s OK; hope springs eternal. Maybe next year! More on that in a bit. We rung in the new year doing fondue with a small group of friends. The vibe was magical and really felt like the GLOBAL…
A few weeks ago I wrote a little ditty about how awful the internet has gotten, compared with the web of my youth. It garnered much more attention than my usual musings, and, as a result, lots of people chimed in. They shared with me great websites, sympathies, and tons of unsolicted advice, some of which actually happened to be good! The good news: I was right — there still is tons of cool stuff…
For my birthday, Erin and I headed to a local (literally across the street) escape-room in Vancouver called Exit Gastown, where we played Lost in Space with just the two of us. Online the difficulty is three stars, but I swear in person it was labeled as four. It’s always hard to get a sense of the actual difficulty between companies, so we went in expecting to escape. We didn’t. By the end of our…
Warning: snooty and written at 5AM. Am I becoming my mother? I’ve been out of contact lately; consider that a symptom of being in the middle of the Atlantic ocean on a Cruise. The idea was merely that it’d be cool to cross an ocean like our forefathers did, and a Cruise just happened to be the easiest way to make that happen. My mom, when hearing of this plan, said (rather disappointedly) “oh… I…
A few times a year I’m asked by people what’s the value in maintaining a blog. To their eyes, a blog is a liability. Not only is it extracurricular work, it also, (they say) limits personal growth, since the old things you’ve said stick around. Furthermore, in today’s age of hyper-cancellation, keeping old ideas around is downright dangerous. Who knows what ideas will be out of vogue next week?…
I managed to wake myself up at 4 in the morning with an insight, and figured I should write it down. As you might imagine, I haven’t been sleeping well lately, so I don’t know whom to credit with this idea — apologies. I’ve been wandering around in a bit of an exhausted zombie funk the last few weeks, and apparently not forming as many short-term memories as one would like. But, anyway, someone…