Computer Things

Computer Things

This is the newsletter version of my website. I post all website updates here. I also post regular content just for the newsletter, on topics like

Formal Methods and applications of math to programming
Software History and Culture
Fringetech and exotic tooling, and deep dives into niche topics
The philosophy and theory of software engineering

I usually put out a public issue every Monday and a private issue every Friday. Still free, just not publicly available on the newsletter archive. Private updates are often sneak peeks of articles I’m working on for the site. You can see the archive of all public essays here. Here are some of my favorites:

If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?: A brief romp through the history of modularity and how most of the “better options” were inspired by inheritance in the first place!
Knights, Puzzles, and Hypermodels: Why checking that a logic puzzle has only one solution is a hard problem, and how we can use a constraint solver to fix it.
How knowing math helps you write better software: It’s not the math proofs that are most valuable, it’s the math machinery. Sometimes the right math trick can take a business problem from “impossible” to “trivial”.
What’s the Most Expensive Software Per Byte? Sure, something like a game engine is expensive, but you’re also getting a whole lotta software for your trouble. What’s the most we can pay for the least amount of code?
Edge Case Poisoning: How edge cases in the problem domain lead to more complex code even in the general case.