Hi there! I’ve written about some of my favorite topics here, including math, games, functional programming, music, type theory, and learning.
I work at Mercury. Before that, I started Hylomorphic.
Please feel free to contact me. I’m always looking for interesting projects, people, and perspectives!
Generating magic squares with backtracking, in Rust
Being yourself makes for a surprisingly good filter
Implementing a super-simple stack-based language
Representational equality, identity functors, and the hashdot operator
A slew of national parks
It's more complex than it seems
Once more: the way to get good is to practice
Pure undirected love
Implementing basic Haskell lenses in twenty exercises
How much work does it really take to survive?
Boundaries and mysteries
Heatmapping channel usage over time
The right time to capture the most you can get
Why don't we avoid avoiding voids
Playing with a simple genetic algorithm
Definitional flavors of the gamma function
Introductory insight into incentives
Building Android, iOS, and web apps with shared front-end logic
Effects of going one level too deep
Should the universe be allowed to hide in plain sight?
Order and chaos at different structural scales
Naturally even or odd
Achieving arbitrary approximation
No iteration!
Understanding execution is exciting
Confusing code and alphabetic enumeration
Ways to handle nonexistent values
Generated and human-edited music
To really learn, first you must become confused
How to be safer with next to no effort
Changing the changing of your mind
Ways to turn things into other things
Playing with fun-to-visualize mathematical structures
Redesigning everyday interactions
Being bad at something never felt this good
Non-primitive-recursive functions and fork bombs
How to do new things without doing new things
Calculating traffic loads
Another horribly abused phrase
Looking up to imperfect role models
Interpolation in its finest forms
Differences between learning, practice, and training
Commands that improve your ghci experience
Facts learnable just by looking inside
Seriously dealing with ideas requires some unoriginality
Light filters aren't spooky objects from beyond classical physics
Type-level Peano exponentiation comes to the rescue
Goals are far more powerful than blacklists
If you're always winning, you're doing something wrong
The story of one research director and a very big choice
You can have all three of C, A, and P
Why so many people despise buzzwords
Fiction could be far stranger and vaster than it is
What non-analysis does better than analysis
Trying to gain intuition for what happens at high speed
A beginner's guide to the ways Haskell helps us avoid errors
The need for a structured set of principled practice problems
Generality, specificity, and their levels of precision
Thoughts on String Theory (the tennis one)
On being underpinned by a different kind of machine
Game design at its most efficient
Thoughts on building habits and following through on goals
Good things happen at 100bpm
Why people spend almost all their time on lesser evils
An eschatological exploration
Remembering the conditions where it doesn't hold
Wild speculations about a certain meeting in the far future
A whirlwind tour through one of the conceptually simplest techniques for better reasoning
Bouncing around the circle of fifths
What's in a name?
Mining the C code for interesting tidbits
What's intergalactically funny?
Translating from MetaLua
Building up some intuition
Differences in some of my favorite sports, at scale
Infinite recursion defeats the type system once again!
How sum types help us avoid bugs
Abusing pattern matching for the greater good
Exploring things that change, but not that much
Why these posts exist