Made of Bugs

An exploration of a key aspect of my personal philosophy of and approach to software engineering: Computers and software generally can be understood and reasoned about.

Some thoughts from career so far on software performance and on performance engineering.

I explore a perspective of viewing test suites as binary classifiers over changesets, which attempt to predict the answer to the question: “Is this change safe to ship?”

This post argues for changing the way you think about a very basic concept in programming / software engineering: array indexing and indices. I make the case for conceptualizing/visualizing them as denoting the positions between elements in an array, rather than naming the elements themselves.

I’m – like so many nerds – endlessly fascinated with the early US space program and the Apollo missions in particular. I’ve attempted to collect my personal list of favorite books and movies for learning more about that program and how it worked, both technically and organizationally.

Ever wondered what really happens when you press Control-C in a terminal? Or what that funny editing mode you get when you run a bare cat command was? This three-post series will answer these questions, and more.

I’m the author of the reptyr tool, which lets you move processes between terminal windows. It’s a fun bit of low-level UNIX trickery, and this post explains the crux of how that tool works.