Perpetual interests

Programming languages

• Programming language design
• Domain-specific languages
  • External textual DSLs
  • List of external textual DSLs
• Parsers, interpreters, compilers
  • Choices for lexing and parsing in Ruby

Knowledge management

• Structuring
  • Organize electronic archives by year
  • Give up and put everything in purgatory
• Note-taking
  • About these notes
  • Notes are not articles
  • The format of a note
• Naming
  • Naming principles
  • Approaches to naming products
  • A project is not a product

Technical writing

(This is related to knowledge management as well.)

• How to write a good README for a product
• Bug report format
• Pull request template
• Lightweight markup languages are inadequate for technical writing
• A good markup language is resilient against failure
• Short-form content doesn’t need to be written as a chronological sequence of blog posts

Finances and budgeting

• Budget for replacing past purchases
• Budgeting categories
• Lending and borrowing: implementation

Software engineering

Ways of working:

• Code reviews
  • Fast code reviews are crucial for team velocity
  • Separate code reviews into feedback levels
  • The purpose of code review is not to find defects
• Communication
  • Drive change by writing structured proposal documents
• Collaboration
  • Short-lived branches are indispensable for refactoring
  • The impact of Git, GitHub, etc

Techniques:

• Can functions be too short?

Software development paradigms

• Build systems
• Spreadsheets and dataflow languages

Developer tooling

• UX matters for developer tools

Projects

• Web site
  • Audience of my web site
  • Contents of my web site