Miscellany

Friends

Books

I want to read as much of the “CS canon” as possible, and to explore a broad range of both contemporary and classic philosophical and historical texts. I'd rather form my own opinions by reading the source material than absorb them secondhand.

Some books that've stuck out (6): Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, Permutation City, The Soul of a New Machine, Weaving the Web.

I keep a fuller log on Goodreads. If you've read any of these, you're more than welcome to email [copy] me and we can chat about them (or others!!)

Web Pages/Talks

• Against Database Teardown Why you should stop resetting your test database
• Against Software Alchemy
• Beej's Guide to Network Programming
• Best Practices for a New Go Developer Read if you plan to code in Go
• Every Vim Binding Lucas Knows
• Godbolt Compiler Explorer
• How I program in C
• It Only Takes Two Weeks Advice for learning and life
• Just Fucking Code (True) satire: "The bar for programming is in the dirt..."
• OWASP Cheat Sheets Info on specific application security topics
• Talks That Changed The Way I Think About Programming
• The Cloister and the Starship A potential solution to AI in education
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions Why you need to understand what's beneath abstractions
• Undergraduate Projects Lab
• Wat Wat!
• Why I Find It Hard to Learn With AI
• You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride You must simply read one book

Quote of the Month*

Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.

— R. W. Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

*or whenever I actually remember to update it