Nov 8, 2021On Working With ZIO ProjectsRecently I made the following tweet: https://twitter.com/posco/status/1456419287229517824 Which says: “don’t want to work with those who platform the alt-right? @odersky ain’t got time for that!” and then adding a link to this comment by Martin Odersky, the creator of the scala language: https://github.com/tpolecat/doobie/pull/1587#issuecomment-961415475 In that comment, Martin succinctly states: “I…Scala3 min readScala3 min read
Jan 13, 2021A moderate take on cryptocurrencyWith Bitcoin prices back up high, people are again variously hyping or disparaging cryptocurrency. I don’t often see moderate takes on the technology, probably because it’s extremism that gets attention, but I thought I’d share my take. Should Bitcoin Be Valuable? I agree with the many skeptics that Bitcoin cannot…Bitcoin5 min readBitcoin5 min read
Oct 29, 2020Designing a Parsing Library in ScalaParsing is something that many programmers dread. Many prefer to cram all their use cases into existing formats, such as JSON or YAML, even when effectively building a DSL in those formats. If one must parse, many prefer to use parser generators such as ANTLR. …Programming8 min readProgramming8 min read
Jun 8, 2020What is a programming language community and what does it value?I started using the Scala programming language in 2010. In 2011, I joined Twitter and worked there using Scala professionally for four and a half years. During that time I saw many comments and criticisms about the Scala community as my interest in Scala grew. I often wondered: did these…Scala8 min readScala8 min read
Oct 15, 2019Some Difficulties with Open Source SoftwareIn 1993 I was at Georgia Tech and first learned of a free version of Unix I could install on my PC. Linux, I had learned from a good friend, was free, if I could find a way to download it. I didn’t find a way, or the time, to…Open Source6 min readOpen Source6 min read
Sep 17, 2017Build. Part 2: Incremental Reproducibility.In part 1 I discussed the main feature a build system should have: reproducibility. In this part I discuss how we get reproducibility with minimal duplicative work in a system like bazel. In bazel we define build targets that have some inputs and produce some output. A target might produce…Programming4 min readProgramming4 min read
Feb 23, 2017Build. Part 1: ReproducibilityWhen you write a bunch of code that may have complex internal dependencies using a language with a compiler, you need to build. Unfortunately, we have not really solved this problem. …Git3 min readGit3 min read
Feb 5, 2017Things I’d like to see in the US governmentSince the election, a lot of people have been talking about what they don’t like. I think it might be important to also talk about what we would like. Having such a list can help us focus on specific actions to increase the chances the future we would like comes…Politics5 min readPolitics5 min read