Thoughts and Essays

ESSAY — A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.

Dr. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language

This is a space to post whatever thoughts of mine that I think might interest a nonzero number of people. Consider it a stream from my head to the Internet. Some of these pieces are little more than random musings, while others are much more substantially fleshed out. This page is heavily inspired by Brandur’s fragments.

If you’re looking for other blog-style stuff that I publish, consider checking out the miscellany page, which offers an “index” into this website.

Hmm, I’d better watch what I write here. Apparently my mom reads these! (Hi mom.)

Exceptions as a Universal Type
Types Aren’t Sets
Finally Accepting Friends on Facebook
Immigration and Science
I've Been to the Mountaintop
The HyperTeX Markup Language
Spring 2023 Reflections
Fall 2022 Reflections
Camels All the Way Down
A Funny Distinction between SML and OCaml
Vim Complexity
Blogging without Metrics
Spring 2022 Reflections
Automatic Image Gallery Layout
ImageMagick Thumbnail Rotation
Fall 2021 Reflections
Bisecting Commits when Failures Are Costly
Platform Fatigue
A Linux Dynamic Linker Bug?
A Short Rant on 15-122
Primitive Recursion as a 15-150 Problem
Spring 2021 Reflections
CS Jokes, in the Sense of Littlewood
Primes and Polynomials
A Funny Irregularity
Grocery Store Economics
Nighttime Photography with Smartphones?
Oddities in Floating Pseudo-elements
CMU Library Proxy Shortcut
Fall 2020 Reflections
Pretty Code with Haskell
Plan Files on AFS
A Tale of Two Talks
CSS and Background Text
Mutt and CMU Email
The Turing-Completeness of TeX
Debian and Firefox ESR
A (Trivial) Mistake in the MDN Web Docs?
Information Density in Languages
Spring 2020 Reflections
Hopping the Great Firewall of China
An Exposition of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem
Fall 2019 Reflections