Reasonable Performance

When I last visited my parents, my mom and dad asked me whether I was worried about ChatGPT or other AI systems taking away programmers’ jobs and whether I was worried about my own future.

A discussion between Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori on the handling of precedence in Jon’s compiler recently popped in my YouTube feed.

When Hare was announced back in 2022, I saw the post on Hacker News, went to the website, looked at the documentation, and my reaction was a lukewarm “meh”.

Most programmers have experienced that feeling of worthlessness and powerlessness when we are trying to implement what should be a simple change, but the existing code base resists our attempts.

In the talk Solving the Right Problems for Engine Programmers, Mike Acton spends a section of his talk on what he considers the three fundamental areas in which most programmers are incompetent: practice, reasonable defaults, problem solving skills.

How hard is it to get Minecraft for a game console?

An article was published in /r/rust a couple weeks ago, Parsing With Nom, a blog post explaining how to use nom to create a parser for a data format in the BitTorrent protocol called Bencode.

(Intentionally provocative title.)

Many programming books give advice on how we can make our code clean.

In the last few years, at the end of the year, the Rust Development Team asks people to write blog entries about their wishes for the next year.

In my last post I made the case that programmers should try and write their software in a way that makes reasonable use of the resources of the computer.

The computers sitting on our desks are incomprehensibly fast.

In the past few months, I’ve become interested—fascinated even—by programming fonts.

On September 18th, 2019, Microsoft released a new typeface for coders, Cascadia Code.

When you choose a font, the most important criteria is “do you like it, and could you stand to look at it for 8 hours per day?”

GNU Parallel1 is a great tool if you want to reduce the running time of a command-line job.

If you’ve not seen Bryan Cantrill talk about software as a reflection of values, let me give you the gist.

For one of my projects at work, I thought I could reduce memory usage by storing vectors of sorted integers as vectors of ranges.

A few years ago, I asked on Reddit whether anyone had recommendations for a theme that used only a few colors.

(This is my response to the call for Rust 2019 Roadmap blog posts.)

Before I became an Emacs user, I was a vi user, and though Emacs is my primary editor, I still use vi daily.

Today I released ppbert 0.8.4 after I read a comment on Hacker News that made me leap out of my chair: buffering StdoutLock improves the performance of IO-bound programs!

A few days ago, I wrote about two Rust pain points when using Rust at work.

The 2018 State of Rust Survey asks the following question: How could we help make Rust more accepted at your company?

Emacs 26.1 was released this week and I thought I’d use the occasion to write a quick post about the main reason why I stick to Emacs: consistency.

ppbert has improved since the last time I wrote about it: I’ve done more work to improve the speed of pretty-printing; the large .bert file that took 3 seconds to process in Februrary now takes 1.5 seconds.

I had an itch: I was pretty-printing the BERT-encoded terms that we use in a production system at work and it was very slow.

I just retired my first good, semi-successful fort in Dwarf Fortress.

A new version of Dwarf Fortress was released last week, and it was all the incentive I needed to start playing again.

The top comment by /u/staticassert in a Reddit thread on type systems makes an interesting point, one that I made in the past myself: what is a type error?

I am on vacation this week, so I decided to dig out a backtracking Sudoku solver I wrote last summer and see what I could do to improve its performance.

Now that I have a slightly more powerful computer, I was finally able to play through The Talos Principle and its DLC, The Road to Gehenna.

At AdGear, the developers typically end their week at “Friday Not Friday”, a team activity from 4pm to 5pm.

The purpose of syntax highlighting is to draw attention to certain parts of the code: it helps us to identify when a comment or a string literal is not properly terminated, when a keyword is misspelled, or when an escape sequence is invalid.

First-in first-out queues are a data structure used in many algorithms (including my favorite one—breadth-first search) and as a building block for complex functionality, the operations on queues should be as efficient as possible.

Being a teaching assistant is a job that most graduate students are asked—pressured even—to do.

I recently purchased Journalistic Writing by Robert Knight.

En août dernier, j’ai utilisé mon premier chèque de paie pour m’offrir un abonnement au journal Le Devoir.

Recursion is my absolute favorite programming technique.

Can you point to a book that changed your outlook on life and had a profound impact on the kind of person you are?

En septembre dernier, j’ai reçu une lettre qui me convoquait à la cours de Montréal pour servir comme candidat-juré.

During the month of December, I completed all the Advent of Code problems using a programming technique called Literate Programming (LP).

Final Fantasy IV is a fantastic game, and Final Fantasy IV Advance is a fine port plagued by an unforgivable flaw.

Following my playthrough of the original Final Fantasy for the NES, I played the remake for the Gameboy Advance, Final Fantasy I: Dawn of Souls.

A week ago, I finished my first playthrough of the original Final Fantasy for the NES.

I used to have a blog, a long time ago, where I’d sometimes write incoherent ramblings about coding, politics, and any other subject that struck my fancy.