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
The mathematics that will help you in your everyday programming.| leanpub.com
Some useful mental models from the world of formal methods.| Hillel Wayne
There’s not a whole lot on TLA+ technique out there: all the resources are either introductions or case studies. Good for people starting out, bad for people past that. I think we need to write more intermediate-level stuff, what Ben Kuhn calls Blub studies. Here’s an attempt at that. Most TLA+ properties are invariants, properties that must be true for every state in the behavior. If we have a simple counter:| Hillel Wayne
I really like the c2 wiki as a historical artifact: a lot of big names in Agile and Extreme Programming argued with each other there.1 One thing they did was the Extreme Programming Challenge, where people tried to test the limits of these approaches. They’d find edge problems (designing databases, remote teams, etc) and see if Agile/XP still worked in that context. In almost every case they quickly decided that yes, it works just fine.| Hillel Wayne
