bytes.zone

Hey, welcome back!

Say you have a table like this: <table> <thead> <tr> <th>Column 1</th> <th>Column 2</th> <th>Column 3</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <!

In late October 2023, I started working at Vendr as a staff design systems engineer.

I've been interested in local-first software for a long time, and recently attended an event about it with a bunch of luminaries from various research groups.

In Alloy, sometimes I want to model clients and servers (or any relationship where two entities are talking.)

Around October 2023, I started growing hydroponic lettuce in my basement.

On the command line, you can use tsort to sort a graph into a list (a topological ordering.)

I like the ideas behind artificial ignorance.

When writing montage I wanted to have a little view of my current task up in the task bar with xbar.

In Alloy, to say "once this is true, it's always true", you say: always (p implies always p) This is true because always means "in all states starting from this one."

I've liked the concept of the Pomodoro technique (basically 25 minute work and 5 minutes rest on a loop through the day) for a long time.

In buck2 basics, we made two rules: genrule( name = "some-target", out = "target-file", cmd = "echo 'Hello, World!'

Time passes (almost a month this time) and I'm back.

I just finished an experiment with Buck 2 at work.

So I recently learned about Dafny.

Ok, it's been about ten days since I last worked on this project.

Before I just jump into finding communities around property testing, I wanted to try and do a cold answer of the launch FTW questions in lesson 4 (which I've been putting off since… June 26th?

As promised, it's tomorrow and I'm brainstorming more audiences.

I'm currently in a "business hack and chat" meeting with some Recurse Center alumni!

After asking around, it turns out that people "in" the formal methods community aren't really that numerous and don't seem to hang out a lot online, or they hang out in tool-specific places.

I've felt a little stuck for the past couple of days.

Ten threads.

Lesson 4!

Gooooood morning!

Lesson 2 is fairly light, but has an important lesson.

OK, doing lesson 1 this morning.

I'm kicking off my microposts (less-edited, ephemeral, subject to disappear at any time) by saying that I'm about to try out launch ftw again.

In the last two posts, we've modeled Git's internal data structures in Alloy.

Last week, we started modeling Git's internals in Alloy.

Today we're going to learn some Alloy by modeling Git objects.

One of the things I like most about using Helix (and Kakoune, when I used it before) is the multiple cursor support.

In Alloy, you can add weak fairness to actions (that is, ensure that they'll always eventually fire if they're able) by saying: (eventually always p) implies (always eventually q) In English, this means: "if p is eventually true, then q will eventually be…

Say you're using Alloy to model some tree structure.

When you generate an SSH key (like I did when looking at signing commits with SSH keys), you get a “randomart image” from ssh-keygen.

Today, let's look at how relationships between sigs in Alloy work.

I sign all my git commits.

When you open up Alloy, the default run in the menu is “Run Default for 4 but 4 int, 4 seq expect 1.”

I've read some nice articles recently which I can sum up as “advice you might as well take.”

I recently learned a little more about how the Pagerank algorithm works.

After making a bunch of models in Alloy, I'm curious if formal modeling is more useful as a thing to do (a process) or a thing to create (an artifact.)

Formal methods tools like Alloy are not just for proving correctness properties in distributed systems (or whatever) but can be a useful tool for mere mortals like me!

I have been using Obsidian for all my notes for something like 6 months now.

The <th> (table head) element in HTML accepts a scope attribute.

An attempt to get some of the things that interest me about large-scale monorepo build systems like Bazel or Buck, but without the learning curve or large footprint.

Just a little note: inspired by /now pages, I've put a bunch of current and past projects up on the home page at bytes.zone, listed by date at bytes.zone/projects.

Alloy is a tool for modeling software.

I've been an on-and-off user of Alloy for several years now, but after switching teams at NoRedInk I decided to start modeling all our new projects in it and teaching my colleagues how to as well.

I've been interested both in environmentalism and in making things for a long time, but hadn't realized until the summer of 2021 that I could combine those into something interesting!

After being an senior-ish software engineer and a team lead (like a tech lead elsewhere) for five years, I was the first "wandering toolmaker" at NoRedInk.

A while ago I wanted to build an import graph from all the frontend code at NoRedInk to build some developer tools.