Computer Things: 2019-2020
$20.00
Minimum price
$25.00
Suggested price
Computer Things: 2019-2020
About the Book
A compilation of all Computer Things newsletter essays in 2019 and 2020, including essays that were for subscribers only. Some of the public essays include:
- The most expensive software per byte
- How everybody misunderstood the "Literate Programming vs Unix Philosophy" 'debate'
- How knowing math helps you write better software
- Why blaming defects on "programmers" and not the broader system is a waste of time.
Some of the private essays include:
- Why Vim is a bad representation of what a "modal editor" is
- The difference between "code" clever and "insightful" clever
- Fringetech
- Multiple first drafts of essays that eventually went on my official website.
Some administrative material was pruned, otherwise all essays are left as-is. Thank you for reading!
About the Author
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The kind of thing this is gonna be
- On Hating Your Tools
- New Post: Formally Modeling Database Migrations
- On Documentation
- Data and Reality, 2nd Edition
- Software isn’t designed for power users
- Automation vs Augmentation
-
New Post! Plus Upkeep
- New Post: How Fast Do I Talk?
- The Crossover Project
- Link: A Cool Game
- We Are Not Special
-
Canonical Examples
- Newsletter Links
- Back on Windows
- What is a “beautiful” proof?
-
A few smaller updates
- Ethnography of antipatterns
- Crossover project update
- New Essay! (Also Workshop Field Notes)
- Workshop Improvements
- Increment Magazine
- Science Turf War
-
Computer Things: YOW Roundup Edition
- YOW
- Why Python is my Favorite Language
-
Why Python Is My Favorite Language
- Solving this
-
On Marketing Formal Methods
- Marketing Formal Methods
- Back up your arguments plz
- Bill Kentstravaganza
-
New Essay, Intentional Errors, and a TLA+ CLI
- New Essay
- Intentional Errors
- TLA+ CLI
- Three Ways Juggling is Like Programming
- A Totally Polished and not-at-all half-baked Take on Static vs Dynamic Typing
- New Essay: The Business Case For Formal Methods
- On Emulation
-
Project updates, request for help, braindump
- Random Thoughts
- New Essay: Feature Interaction Bugs
-
10 Most(ly dead) important programming languages (first draft)
- tlacli now a python package
- First draft
-
Happy Precedence Day!
- Formal Methods Tweetstorm
- Precedence is weird
-
Donald Knuth Was Framed
- YOW! Talk
- Donald Knuth Was Framed
-
On Scaling Mental Models
- No Newsletter Next Week
- The Actual Thing
- The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition
-
Online Workshops, Project Updates, New Post
- Leo Trip Report
- On Customization
-
Special Purpose Languages
- Github acquires NPM
- Special Purpose Languages
-
Please don’t write your documentation in Markdown
- What to use instead
-
Language Warts and Vim Trix
- New(ish post)
- Language Warts
-
What’s the Most Expensive Software Per Byte?
- Expensive
- Small
- Small and Expensive
- Very Small and Very Expensive
- Small and Hideously Expensive
- Conclusion
- Update 2020-04-03
-
A Very Brief Intro to Formal Methods (aka my job)
- Formal Methods
-
Announcing Alloydocs, updates on major projects
- Alloydocs
- What’s Next
- Making Illegal States Unrepresentable
-
Workshop Announcement, Vim is a bad modal editor
- Vim is a bad modal editor
- Better modal editors
-
New Essay, Office Hours, and a short essay
- New Essay
- Terse Programming Languages
-
Sneak Peek: Constructive vs Predicative Data
- Techniques for constructive solutions
- Thoughts
- How I Write Talks
- Rage Against the God Machine
-
New Essay: In Praise of AutoHotKey
- New Essay: In Praise of AutoHotKey
- Nothing else for now
-
If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
- Some thoughts on first-generation solutions
-
Workshop Innovations and New Website Essay
- New essay: constructive versus predicative data
- Workshop innovations
- Defects are not the fault of programmers
- Some Ranting About Examples
- Monads and Transducers are Literally 100% The Same Thing
- New TLA+ Workshop, New PBT Essay
-
Understanding Fairness
- Stuttering
- Strong fairness
- Thoughts
-
Why You Should Always Blindly Chase Industry Trends
- “Are we really engineers” video now available
-
Why You Should Always Blindly Chase Industry Trends
- Disclaimers
- Technical Benefits
- Career Benefits
- Personal Benefits
- Conclusion
-
Situated Software
- New essay
- Situated software
-
I have become ideas guy
- Random Thoughts
-
Merchants on the Ivory Road
- Merchants on the Ivory Road
-
J sieves as a tool of thought
- J sieves as a tool of thought
- Sieves
- Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel
-
New essay and some thoughts on humility
- New essay
- On Humility
- Software correctness is a lot like flossing
-
How knowing math helps you write better software
- Bonus: De Morgan’s Paradoxes
-
Test Inference
- Miscellaneous thoughts
-
New Essay and a Very Peculiar Optimization
- New Essay
- Storing Sorts
- Discussion
-
What’s the Deal with Message Passing, Anyway
- Tweetstorms
- Please read the paper before you comment
-
Formal Specification Languages
- Conclusion
- Tweetstorms
-
Treasure Hunting in the Noosphere
- Office Hours
- Fringetech
- Tweetstorms
-
Finding Go Concurrency Bugs with TLA+
- Discussion
- That Time I Almost Joined a Software Cult
-
Write Notes for Your Code
- New Essay
- Write Notes For Your Code
- Updates on the Crossover Project
-
Software Engineers Don’t Have Disciplines
- What is a discipline?
-
New essay, new “book” thingy
- New Essay
- New “Book”: Graveyard
- Mystery Knowledge
-
We’re Bad at SAT Solvers
- We’re bad at SAT Solvers
-
We have met the Excelnemy and he is us
- Whoops on SAT
-
Edge Case Poisoning
- Addressing edge case poisoning
-
The Pendulum Swings Eternal
- Alloy Stream
- The Pendulum Swings Eternal
- Sneak Peek: Two Workers are Quadratically Better than One
-
Two Workers are Quadratically Better than one
- Planning Ahead
- Specifying Throughput
- Specifying Latency
- Two Workers
- Generalizing the Model
- Conclusion
- TLA+ Helped Me Count to Six
-
New Essay, Universal Examples, Old Essay
- Universal examples
-
Programs Writing Programs
- New Essay
-
Programs Writing Programs
- Other uses
- Misc
-
No, your clean code won’t save the planet
- Why do people do this?
- Why I Still Use Vim
-
Weird Examples and Weird Tools
- Weird Examples
- Weird Tools
-
Knights, Puzzles, and Hypermodels
- Knights, Puzzles, and Hypermodels
- There’s always more history
- Computer Things: Vacation Phone-In Edition
-
Safety and Liveness Properties
- Limitations of LTL
- Exotic Properties
- Oracle Testing
-
New Essay, New Workshop, Thoughts on Cleverness
- On Cleverness
-
The Most Important Video Game Ever Made
- The Most Important Video Game Ever Made
- Cross-Branch Testing
- Notes
The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.
You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!
So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?
See full terms...
80% Royalties. Earn $16 on a $20 book.
We pay 80% royalties. That's not a typo: you earn $16 on a $20 sale. If we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book or course for $20, you'll earn $80,000.
(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)
In fact, authors have earnedover $12 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
