Home on teideal glic deisbhéalach

I’ve been a lifelong reader, which has proved a fragile habit in our era of endless trivial distraction.

A Typography & Layout Demo This is a typography and layout test page for my Hugo + PaperMod setup.

Stub page for verifying internal typography links.

Over the past few months, the Sigma engineering team at Facebook has rolled out a major Haskell project: a rewrite of Sigma, an important weapon in our armory for fighting spam and malware.

Almost five years after I initially released criterion, I’m delighted to announce a major release with a large number of appealing new features.

Maintenance status: I no longer actively maintain this software.

(Summary: I’ve developed some algorithms for a statistical technique called the jackknife that run in O(n) time instead of O(n²).)

I’m pleased to introduce the third generation of my attoparsec parsing library.

I threw together a little code tonight to calculate the Katz centrality of packages on Hackage.

Since the beginning of April, David Mazières and I have been back in the saddle teaching CS240H at Stanford again.

Maintenance status: I no longer actively maintain this software.

It’s been exciting to see the positive reception in the tech press and the open source community to Hack, the new programming language that my team at Facebook released last week.

It’s time someone finally wrote a proper review of Simon Marlow’s amazing book, Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell.

I just released new versions of the Haskell text, attoparsec, and aeson libraries on Hackage, and there’s a surprising amount to look forward to in them.

Yesterday, Michael Snoyman reported a surprising regression in version 1.0 of my Haskell text library: for some invalid inputs, the UTF-8 decoder was truncating the invalid data instead of throwing an exception.

For a while now, I’ve had it in mind to improve the encoding performance of my Haskell JSON package, aeson.

Quoth Wikipedia: Big data[1][2] is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.

[Edit: a few hours after I wrote this post, I wrote some code to get rid of the inflation phenomenon it describes, and I’ll publish a corresponding update to criterion shortly.

A few days ago, my Facebook colleague Andrei Alexandrescu posted a note entitled Three Optimization Tips for C++, which reminded me that I had unfinished business with Haskell’s text package.

I have spent quite some time over the last couple of months improving the Haskell hashable library, and all of my efforts eventually turned into a near-complete rewrite of the library.

I’ve recently been talking with Johan Tibell about submitting his hashable package to become a part of the Haskell Platform.

The case of the mysterious explosion in space A few months ago, reports began to filter in of an unhappy problem with the Haskell text package: it was causing huge object files to be generated when a file contained lots of string literals.

While I was in New York for QCon last week, the temperatures started out quite mild, but soared back to their usual sweltering summertime levels by midweek.

Back in 2005, Andy Wingo wrote a neat little statistical profiler named statprof that promptly disappeared into obscurity.

I’m approaching my fourth anniversary of using github.

After months of work, and a number of great contributions from other developers, I just released version 0.4 of aeson, the de facto standard Haskell JSON library.

(Cross-posted from the MailRank engineering blog.)

I’m pleased to announce a major release of of the Haskell statistics library, version 0.10.0.0.

Last week, I flew to St Louis for the excellent Strange Loop conference, where I gave a 3-hour Haskell tutorial and a talk on how we use Haskell at my startup company, MailRank.

The other night, I had a random whim to spend a couple of minutes looking at the performance of UTF-8 decoding in the Haskell Unicode text package.

Here’s something I bet you never think about, and for good reason: how are floating-point numbers rendered as text strings?

Update: I just released attoparsec 0.9.1.0, which undoes all of the changes described below.

Looks like I’ve got a busy autumn ahead!

It’s been a few weeks since I last wrote about the aeson library for working with JSON in Haskell, but this isn’t because I’ve been idle.

Sometimes, when a software package meets a certain level of maturity (or the desire to hack on it fades sufficiently), it’s tempting to consider it “done”.

Every functional programmer worth their salt seems to end up with at least a few stories to tell about programming in CPS, also known as continuation passing style.

I’ve spent some time over the past few weeks improving the performance of the attoparsec parsing library, and of the aeson JSON library.

I’m delighted to say that after a couple of years of a break from the startup world (which I’ve inhabited for most of the past decade), I’ve decided to throw my hat back into the ring.

Peter Seibel (the man behind Practical Common Lisp) is launching a new publication, Code Quarterly, which looks intriguing to me.

One of the particularly nice things about working with a distributed revision control tool these days is that I can sidestep the choice of winning tool.

Over the past couple of years, since David Roundy handed over control of the darcs revision control system to a talented team of developers, it has come a long way in stability and performance.

Ersin Er wrote a brief blog post about handling the Turkish language in Haskell.