Computer Things: 2019-2020
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.
See full terms
Do Well. Do Good.
Authors have earned$11,721,492writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
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), EPUB (for phones and tablets) and MOBI (for 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
Top Books
- #1
Recipes for Decoupling
Matthias NobackWrite software that survives
- #2
CQRS by Example
Carlos Buenosvinos, Christian Soronellas, and Keyvan Akbary- Leverage your Software Architecture skills by learning everything about CQRS in detail with lots of examples
- Develop faster applications by applying CQRS and fostering Read Models and Projections
- Learn how to apply CQRS into a brownfield project from a pragmatic approach
- #3
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
- #4
Maîtriser Apache JMeter
Philippe Mouawad, Bruno Demion (Milamber), and Antonio Gomes RodriguesToute la puissance d'Apache JMeter expliquée par ses commiteurs et utilisateurs experts. De l'intégration continue en passant par le Cloud, vous découvrirez comment intégrer JMeter à vos processus "Agile" et Devops.
If you're looking for the newer english version of this book, go to Master JMeter : From load testing to DevOps
- #5
C++20 - The Complete Guide
Nicolai M. JosuttisAll new language and library features of C++20 (for those who know previous C++ versions).
The book presents all new language and library features of C++20. Learn how this impacts day-to-day programming, to benefit in practice, to combine new features, and to avoid all new traps.
Buy early, pay less, free updates.
Other books:
- #6
Jetpack Compose internals
Jorge CastilloJetpack Compose is the future of Android UI. Master how it works internally and become a more efficient developer with it. You'll also find it valuable if you are not an Android dev. This book provides all the details to understand how the Compose compiler & runtime work, and how to create a client library using them.
- #7
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
- #8
Mastering STM32 - Second Edition
Carmine NovielloWith more than 1200 microcontrollers, STM32 is probably the most complete ARM Cortex-M platform on the market. This book aims to be the most complete guide around introducing the reader to this exciting MCU portfolio from ST Microelectronics and its official CubeHAL and STM32CubeIDE development environment.
- #9
Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring
Matthias Noback and Tomas VotrubaLearn how to automatically and continuously upgrade and improve your PHP code base
- #10
The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book
Andriy BurkovEverything you really need to know in Machine Learning in a hundred pages.
Top Bundles
- #2
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #3
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #4
Software Architecture
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #5
Static Analysis and Automated Refactoring
2 Books
As PHP developers we are living in the "Age of Static Analysis". We can use a tool like PHPStan to learn about potential bugs before we ship our code to production, and we can enforce our team's programming standards using custom PHPStan rules. Recipes for Decoupling by Matthias Noback teaches you in great detail how to do this, while also... - #9
All the Books of The Medical Futurist
6 Books
We put together the most popular books from The Medical Futurist to provide a clear picture about the major trends shaping the future of medicine and healthcare. Digital health technologies, artificial intelligence, the future of 20 medical specialties, big pharma, data privacy, digital health investments and how technology giants such as Amazon...
