Read Essays by Stepan Parunashvili
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Software Engineering 8Programming Languages 6Web & Frontend 2Life, Learning & Writing 2Databases & Data 2Tools & Productivity 1
In 1931, a 25-year-old Kurt Gödel wrote a proof that turned mathematics upside down. The implication was so astounding, and his proof so elegant that it was...kind of funny. I wanted to share his discovery with you. Fair warning though, I’m not a mathematician; I’m a programmer. This means my understanding is…
I used Apple Configurator to turn my iPhone into a dumb phone. I can only access the apps and websites I want to use, and it’s feeling great!
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.
Over the last year, my 13 year old nephew developed a love for hacking. From anime chat , to snake , a minimal twitter , a blog , to an anime music startup , he’s built some cool stuff (1). What I’m most proud of though, is that he’s done this with self directed play, rather than with a rigid curriculum.
If progress follows it's usual strategy, then whatever is difficult and valuable to do today will become easy and normal tomorrow. I imagine we'll discover new abstractions, which will make writing Google Docs as easy as the average web app is today.
In A Database in the Browser , I wrote that the schleps we face as UI engineers are actually database problems in disguise [1] . This begged the question: would a database-looking solution solve them?
Painters at work notice details we’d ignore. From those details they develop delightful insights into reality. What do I mean? Let’s look at Van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait” and find out:
My cofounder Joe and I recently finished SICP. It was a mind-bending experience: you start from just 3 concepts, and you recursively build up algebraic equation solvers, circuit simulators, 4 interpreters, and a compiler.
9 months ago, I took a gander at PG’s guide to Bel . If you haven’t read it, here’s the premise:
“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.
I got into a discussion about monads recently. On a search to find some resources to share, I realized that most essays explained them with type signatures and rules. A missing ingredient to grok them, I think, is to understand the intuition behind them. How could you end up inventing monads?
Joe and I recently kicked off a re-read of SICP . I can say that it is the most interesting textbook I have gone through. Imagine, you begin with just 4 or 5 constructs, and you end up building algebraic equation solvers, circuit simulators, and even logic programming languages. Because you start off with such few…