Blog on Lucas's Webpage

A day is a remarkably long time.

If you’ve ever been advised to “[not compare yourself to others]”1, you’ve been given an impossible task2.

Most normal people find skydiving frightening, and for good reason1.

“Types and Programming Languages” (T&PLs) is a relatively-esoteric1 textbook about type theory.

I’m an enthusiast and daily user of git’s command line interface 1.

What is Competitive Programming?

Intro Motivation, though often overlooked, is arguably the strongest influence on a developer’s1 productivity.

Ideas and Code Writing code is a never-ending battle to translate abstract ideas into formal instructions.

Note: this isn’t a security post: “hacking” here means “unclean coding”, i.e.

All Hail The Object Design Patterns is a classic book from the 90s that centers around low-level OOP idioms.

In my youth, I practiced Tae-Kwon-Do1.

I don’t know of a developer who doesn’t appreciate version control.

I’ve written a lot of posts glorifying functional programming lately, but they tend to be abstract and hypothetical.

Learning computer science is a lot like forming an n-dimensional1 snowball.

Disclaimer: This post is unapologetically romantic.

Programming is hard.

Before I discovered programming, a lot of my time around computers was spent becoming intimately familiar with the software I used on a daily basis.

No, this is not an April Fools’ Day joke.

A few decades ago, universities were the only place where it was possible for students to use and learn about computers; now it’s possible to teach yourself the entire curriculum without leaving your basement.

Functional programming (FP) has an odd status among developers.

There are a lot of opinions about the “best ways” to learn programming on the internet, but they’re usually some combination of the following: “Just write code” (“learn by doing”) Learn “the basics” (e.g.

Monads are data types1 that expose methods for chaining, typically for the sake of abstracting state.

I’ve been working on writing an APL Interpreter recently.

I love vim.

I recently started learning Haskell, and I came across a structure in the language that really made me think: Currying.

The Vim Lecture I was initially hesitant to write a post about Vim, because most of what I have to say about it has already been said somewhere on the internet1.

TL;DR: long cards are bad; short cards are good.

What and Why Leetcode is a popular platform for studying DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms), especially for coding/technical interviews, competitive programming, and education in general.

I like to plan things out, especially things of high importance.

There seems to be a notion that owning an expensive computer is necessary to study computer science.