When the pandemic lockdowns started, I was in the middle of teaching a semester-long class on programming languages. I had to start giving my content online. I hated it. I hated that I couldn’t interact with the class. I hated having to juggle different views, switching from slides, to me, to an editor. But most of all, I hated talking while sitting down. Just the act of sitting seemed to drain all the energy out of it. Since then I’ve been experimenting with different ways of organizing my online speaking environment, and yesterday I think I’ve come close to nailing it. Video My video solutio ..read more

FADE IN: EXT. STREET - DAYTIME We’re looking through the top of a tree at a second-floor window of a townhouse. It’s obviously springtime: the tree has blossoms, and the leaves are small and bright green. Through the window we see movement and the light turns off. [CAMERA pans down to front door level. CASEY opens door. CAMERA pans to follow her down to street level, then pans horizontally, keeping her in profile, as she walks.] CASEY looks confident. TITLES: The Interview Titles play over montage: walking, wait for bus, in bus, walking, signing it at office reception, elevator. Titles end. IN ..read more

One of my students emailed me privately. She wanted to learn a new language over the summer, but she has “always had trouble finding structure and knowing what to learn when pursuing independent studies such as these.” I’ve had this same question a number of times in the past, so I thought it might be useful to post my response. This is just my way of thinking about it. I’d be interested to hear your techniques for picking up new things. I do a fair amount of woodworking. It’s one of those hobbies where you are constantly tempted by bright, shiny new tools. When I first started, I fell into t ..read more

The first five years of my professional career were spent programming PDP-11s, mostly in assembler. This turned out to be a good thing: not only because I learned a lot about how machines work, but also because I was lucky enough to do it on a PDP. The PDP architecture is a marvel of orthogonal design. The instruction set separates what you want to do (the opcode) from what you want to do it to (the source and destination operands). The source and destination can use eight different addressing modes to reference registers, things pointed to by registers, things pointed to by those things, all ..read more