I'm a photographer, programmer, dancer, and bassist currently living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Visit stevelosh.com → On Hacker News May 2010 – Mar 2025
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I've gotten a bunch of emails asking for advice on how to learn Common Lisp in the present day. I decided to write down all the advice I've been giving through email and social media posts in the hopes that someone might find it useful.
A Python programmer handed her ~/.gitconfig to Master Git. Among the many lines were the following:
It's 2011. Personal computers have been around and popular for well over a decade now, and yet we still have to deal with a huge amount of physical paper.
I'm a programmer. I work with text files for 6-12 hours every weekday so I care about the text editor I use. If switching to a different editor can increase my efficiency by even 10% it would save a good chunk of my time and let me get back to making cool things.
A while ago I wrote a post about switching back to Vim . Since then I've written two plugins for Vim, one of which has been officially "released".
Now that Sparrow is effectively dead many of its users will be looking for a new email client. If you're not afraid of the terminal you may want to give Mutt a try.
This post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it's about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries.
I write a lot of command-line programs. For tiny programs I usually go with the typical UNIX approach: throw together a half-assed shell script and move on. For large programs I make a full Common Lisp project, with an ASDF system definition and such. But there's a middle ground of small ish programs that don't…
In the previous post we looked at how to emulate a CHIP-8 CPU with Common Lisp. But a CPU alone isn't much fun to play, so in this post we'll add a screen to the emulator with Qt .
For the past year and a half or so I've been working full-time at Dumbwaiter Design doing Django development. I've picked up a bunch of useful tricks along the way that help me work, and I figured I'd share them.
One of the things I love about Lisp is that it gives you the ability to change and mold the syntax of the language to what you need. In this post I want to look at the evolution of a little macro I've been playing around with for a while now.
If you ignore the practical issues of computers like size, weight, cost, heat, and so on, what do you really need in a programming language? Let's play around with this question.
In late October the video game streaming site Twitch.tv launched "Twitch Creative" , essentially giving people permission to stream non-video game related creative content on the site. To celebrate the launch they streamed all 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross in a giant marathon.
A while back I decided to try to write a Game Boy emulator in Common Lisp based on this series of articles . I made some good progress but eventually got bogged down because I was trying to learn a bunch of complex new things at once:
I've been reading a lot of Lisp books lately, some more advanced than others. All of the introductory books I've seen cover the idea of symbolic computation, but most of them breeze past it with just a few pages about "symbols" and "quoting". For many programmers coming from non-Lisp languages these are new, foreign…
A while ago I was working on a Common Lisp library that makes use of the Metaobject Protocol . I ran into a few edge cases around dependencies between classes and it took a while for me to figure out how to solve them, so I wanted to write down what I learned in case anyone else might find it useful. This post is an…
The August 2016 Lisp Game Jam just wrapped up at the end of last week. I had some free time so I decided to take part, but I did something a bit different. Instead of making a new game I ported an existing one ( Silt ) to Common Lisp.
Lately I've had an urge to start playing a few games again, namely Nethack and Dwarf Fortress (the latter being triggered by this book ). Aside from being incredibly fun, they also made me want to play around with writing a roguelike game of my own.
I spend a lot of my time (easily over 8 hours a day) at a keyboard. As you might have guessed from my previous entries about Vim and Mutt I'm not averse to spending a few hours to improve an environment I'm going to be spending tens of thousands of hours in over the next few years, so it shouldn't be a shock that my…
I've been hanging out in the #mercurial and #bitbucket channels on freenode a lot lately, and I've noticed a topic that comes up a lot is "how does Mercurial 's branching differ from git 's branching?"