Posts

Why Relational Databases Are Absurd (2025-03-30)

A rant about how SQL databases forget the past and how immutable, append-only models like Datomic offer a better approach.
Backronym Programming Language Poetry (2025-03-24)

A whimsical walk through programming languages as acronym spells and poetic code-rants. Nerdy wordplay and irreverent insights.

Twos complement (2024-09-18)

How I built a tiny computer
The 14-Year-Old Who Gave Lisp a Home (2024-01-23)

From building Lisp on the PDP-1 at age 14 to shaping the future of programming

Emacs, Java, and the Finger-Twisting History Between Them (2023-09-18)

The unexpected historical overlap between Emacs, Java, and the people who shaped both.
The Teletype Model 33 – And the Curse of line breaks (2023-09-18)

The Teletype Model 33 is often blamed for why Windows and Linux have never quite agreed on how to break a line of text
The Tip-Ex key (2023-09-18)

A brief and geeky history of the Delete key, ASCII 127, and how mistakes used to be punched into paper.
Worry About Data Structures (2023-09-18)

Why thinking about data, not syntax, might be the best thing you've done for your code all year.
Pioneering Women in Programming (2023-03-05)

From Ada Lovelace to Fran Allen — a tribute to the women who quietly (and not-so-quietly) built the foundation of modern computing.

Filter, Map, Reductions with Trampoline (2017-02-17)

Use recursion with a trampoline to implement lazy versions of map, filter and reduce
Immutable Beans in Java (2017-01-17)

Using AtomicReference to maintain immutable data with transactional updates in Java

Isolation Levels and Write Skew (2016-10-08)

A few notes on isolation levels in relational databases
Functional Composition and Threading Calls in Java (2016-03-08)

Compose to get some flow in Java
Expressive Conditionals in Java - Reclaiming the 'if' expression (2016-03-06)

Replace noisy if statements in Java with expressive, composable alternatives. An implementation of the cond expression for java, similar to the ones in Lisps, using lambda expressions.
Random Functional Values (2016-01-20)

Reapeatable randomness

Reducers & Leibniz (2013-07-01)

Trying out reducers while searching for 𝜋
REPL: Like art (2013-05-25)

The source code of REPL is literally (-> (read) (eval) (print) (Loop))
Hello World Polyglot in Brainf*ck and Whitespace (2013-04-09)

Esoteric fun with mixing Brainf*ck and Whitespace in the same file