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The Configuration Complexity Curse
Why managing configuration has become so complex and how data configuration languages like CUE offer a path forward.
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Databases always have a schema (2018)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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What Makes a Graphics Systems Paper Beautiful
Addendum: I've added a few additional tips for conference papers chairs, papers committee members, and papers sorters .
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An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering
A little while ago I was doing some research into the state-of-the-art for approximating subsurface scattering effects in real-time (mainly for skin rendering), and I had taken a bunch of loose notes to help me keep all of the details straight. I thought it might be useful to turn those notes into a full blog post, in…
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A Brutal Look at Balanced Parentheses, Computing Machines, and Pushdown Automata
As discussed in Pattern Matching and Recursion , a well-known programming puzzle is to write a function that determines whether a string of parentheses is “balanced,” i.e. each opening parenthesis has a corresponding closing parenthesis, and the parentheses are properly nested.
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So Long, MSDN Blog
UPDATE 4: My original MSDN blog content, minus the comments, has been archived publicly on the MSDN site; thanks again to Scott and Dan and everyone else who made this happen. Why minus the comment…
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Serverless collaborative editor using CRDT
Previously I've worked on a collaborative tool, which worked like Google Docs. This project was called crepl . Because I stopped paying for hosting of its server, that project is now offline. That made me consider: what if a collaborative editor wouldn't need a server?
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Async.h – asynchronous, stackless subroutines in C
The async/await idiom is becoming increasingly popular. The first widely used language to include it was C#, and it has now spread into Jav...
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Asynchronous Programming in Rust
Asynchronous programming in Rust continues to make exciting strides, including the upcoming stabilization of the futures API . But, while these core APIs make it possible to write async Rust code today, it's not easy: it's a far cry from the smoothness of synchronous code.
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Jumping Back and Forth
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
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Emulator basics: a stack and register machine
Writing an x86 emulator from scratch in JavaScript: 1. a stack and register machine
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Let’s stop copying C (2016)
Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general? C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of…
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Why to normalize Unicode strings
Never heard of Unicode normalization? You’re not alone. But it will save you a lot of trouble.
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The Road to Valhalla
The goal of Project Valhalla is to bring more flexible flattened data types to JVM-based languages, to bring the programming model back in line with the performance characteristics of modern hardware. The core feature is inline classes (known previously as value types ), but such a fundamental perturbation of the JVM…
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I got control of my spending with some no-code services and 100 lines of Python
Lessons learned about moving fast and shipping products
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Developing a Statically Typed Programming Language (2017)
In this blog post we’ll go through a sample implementation of a type checker, interpreter and a transpiler for a basic purely functional programming language, which is based on the lambda calculus. We will do a “full-stack” programming language development by going through formal definition of the language’s syntax…
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Beating C with 70 lines of Go
Writing a faster wc utility in Go
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What the Royal Astronomical Society in 1884 Tells Us About Python Today
The plainly wrong behavior of a ubiquitous Python library echoes a British astronomical report from 1884.
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Seven Commandments for Event-Driven Architectures
The critical rules to keep in mind when designing an event-driven architecture
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Trinity: PSP Emulator Escape
Trinity is a fully chained exploit for the PS Vita™ consisting of six unique vulnerabilities. It is based on a decade of knowledge and research. The source code of Trinity can be found here.
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String Diagrams for Linear Algebra
We have established that there is a homomorphism called θ from B, the PROP of diagrams, to Mat, the PROP of matrices. To do this, it was enough to say where θ takes the four stars of the story so f…
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A Grimoire of Functions
I'm the kind of person who reads encyclopedias front to back just for fun, and I've been fascinated by mathematical special functions at least since my first encounter with the gamma function as a teenager. My work implementing numerical and symbolic algorithms in mpmath , Arb and other software projects during the…
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Dwindling CPAN Releases
This couple of months I’ve been casually looking at daily CPAN uploads, because I entered the Once-a-day-releases game. I notice that the uploads are getting scarcer and scarcer. So today I d…
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