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How I Program Stuff
My method for writing code I care about: isolate myself for confidence and energy, eliminate every distraction, then code ruthlessly with no regrets.
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A Tour of the Acme Editor
People I work with recognize my computer easily: it's the one with nothing but yellow windows and blue bars on the screen. That's the text editor acme, written by Rob Pike for Plan 9 in the early 1990s. Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface. It's difficult to explain acme without seeing it…
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Use Zsh
Zsh is the new hotness. Well newer and hotter than Bash anyway, since the first version of Bash was released in June 1989, while the young and peppy …
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Java 8 Lambdas
Scheduled for release in 2013 , Java 8 will include language support for lambda functions. Although the specification is still in flux, lam...
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Steve Yegge and Grok
Bryan Summersett's home page.
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A Git Horror Story: Repository Integrity With Signed Commits
(Note: This article was written at the end of 2012 and is out of date. I will update it at some point, but until then, please keep that in perspective.)
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4 min Emacs screencast inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle
And its sibling slime-js-jack-in-browser are some conveniences that I've built around slime-js. You can find them here in my .emacs.d on github.
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A Boggling Return to C
My first real programming class, back in high school, was taught in C. I found it difficult and I remember spending the whole year thinking that I really had no aptitude for programming. I think I got an OK grade in the end, but I felt like I was really struggling compared to the other students in the class. It wasn’t…
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Relational shell programming
Unix is a bestiary of ad hoc databases: comma-, colon-, tab- and space-separated tables. Think of /etc/* or /var/log/* , or of columnar commands.
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Building a MongoDB Clone in Postgres
I had a crazy thought. Don't all good ideas start with that phrase? Well, this one was suitably crazy: why not build my own version of MongoDB right on top of Postgres? It sounds a little far-fetched, but in all honesty it's pretty simple.
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Implementing Fast Interpreters
Many modern virtual machines include either a fast interpreter or a fast baseline compiler. A baseline compiler needs extra memory and is li...
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Visualizing binaries with space-filling curves
Edit: Since this post, I've created an interactive tool for binary visualisation - see it at binvis.io
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Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software
Yesterday I received a new serious bug report against Mono in Debian. For those not in the know, “serious” severity is release critical, and can trigger removal of a package from the di…
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Of abusive behavior in programming communities
It is traditional for each release of perl to be announced with a form letter beginning with a quote, or epigraph, chosen by the release engineer. For Perl 5.16.0, I chose the penultimate stanza from W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939.
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