Hi, I'm Hillel. This is the newsletter version of my website. I post all website updates here. I also post weekly content just for the newsletter, on topics like Formal Methods Software History and Culture Fringetech and exotic tooling The philosophy and theory of software engineering You can see the archive of all public essays here.| buttondown.com
Last year a client asked me to solve a problem: they wanted to be able to compose two large TLA+ specs as part of a larger system. Normally you’re not supposed to do this and instead write one large spec with both systems hardcoded in, but these specs were enormous and had many internal invariants of their own. They needed a way to develop the two specs independently and then integrate them with minimal overhead.| Hillel Wayne
As engineers, it can be really satisfying for us to implement clever, terse solutions to problems, relying on advanced tricks and techniques. As a result, we often write code that is hostile and inaccessible to the junior folks on our team. This article makes the case that we should strive to write simple, accessible code, using the dumb old primitives that everyone knows.| www.joshwcomeau.com
Graphing TLA+ state spaces for fun and profit.| Hillel Wayne
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become the engineer that wrote Data Driven Products Now! if Kellan had not been there to so thoroughly stick the landing on technology choices.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
Let's make the CPython team regret adding pattern matching to Python!| Hillel Wayne
