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Those Damn Squares

I’m not one for productivity metrics. I’ve tried apps like ActivityWatch and they don’t do it for me. Goodhart’s Law comes to mind: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. However there is one metric I occasionally use: GitHub squares. I’m referring to those squares that can either be filled in with varying shades of green—indicating you’ve contributed a certain amount of times this day—or left gray, as an indicator that you have not contributed this day.

Don’t Focus On The Mountain; Focus On The Path

This story starts with structs. I had been making some progress with my programming language, Saber. I had implemented functions, control flow, local variables, basically enough to get a factoral function written. However Saber needed more than just the basics. I wanted structs, strings, all the nice complicated types that we take for granted. For that I needed dynamic allocation. For that I needed an allocator. But wait, I actually need a garbage collector.

Learn to Cook

Do yourself a favor. Learn to cook. Not only is it easy, rewarding, fun, intellectually stimulating, attractive, yadda yadda, it’s a pretty essential part of one’s existence. Every human needs to consume food to survive. It might be good to know how to make food. You don’t have to cook often, although practice will make you better. Yes, yes, I know you’re too busy creating a company/raising a child/writing a novel to cook.

Saber Notes: Strings

I’ve been working on my language, Saber a lot recently. I figured I should keep some notes on implementation in case someone finds them useful, even if that’s only future-me. Saber is a scripting language intended to be a lightweight row-polymorphic psuedo-functional language that compiles to WebAssembly. Think OCaml meets the best parts of ES6. Of course right now I’m just trying to get basic functionality finished. The compiler is written in Rust.

Saber Notes Factorial

I’ve been working on my language, Saber a lot recently. I figured I should keep some notes on implementation in case someone finds them useful, even if that’s only future-me. Saber is a scripting language intended to be a lightweight row-polymorphic psuedo-functional language that compiles to WebAssembly. Think OCaml meets the best parts of ES6. Of course right now I’m just trying to get basic functionality finished. The compiler is written in Rust.

Saber Notes: Name Table, Parameters & Local Variables

I’ve been working on my language, Saber a lot recently. I figured I should keep some notes on implementation in case someone finds them useful, even if that’s only future-me. Saber is a scripting language intended to be a lightweight row-polymorphic psuedo-functional language that compiles to WebAssembly. Think OCaml meets the best parts of ES6. Of course right now I’m just trying to get basic functionality finished. The compiler is written in Rust.

We Get It

Spend enough time procrastinating on reddit, you inevitable end up reading the same links again and again and again. One of the common links I see are the ones that complain about JavaScript. There’s wat, the tried and tired ecosystem article and many many more. To all of those articles, I just want to say: We get it We get it, JavaScript sucks. It’s insecure, it has weird features, npm is out of control, etc.

Apple & Fashion

Go online and you’ll find particularly potent venom directed towards Apple. Critics denigrate their products as overpriced, underpowered1 scams that only uninformed dolts would buy. Others insist that Apple has become unduly obsessed with aesthetics. They perpetually raise the question: Do people really want thinner phones? Do people really need a lighter laptop? To answer these questions, yes. People do want a thinner phone. They do want a lighter laptop. Why?

People Suck at Email

Just because someone has not responded to an email in a few days doesn’t mean they’re angry at you. It doesn’t mean they don’t like you. It doesn’t mean they want to stop talking to you. They most likely forgot. Expect to send at least a couple follow up emails. If the person you are emailing is famous or important or a leader of some sorts, expect to send even more emails.

Surviving CSO

Computer Systems Organization, or CSO, is the third class in NYU CAS’s computer science program. I’ve noticed that a lot of people have trouble in CSO. This is for good reasons. The class covers a lot of ground, from the C language to systems architecture to concurrency. This is especially tricky because students face a massive paradigm shift from the relatively high level bubble of Python and Java with its managed memory and forgiving error messages, to the raw, bare metal of C and x86 assembly.