Andrew Helwer
ahelwer.ca
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Overview
Independent software engineering consultant with over a decade of professional experience.Previously worked at Acceleware, Microsoft Azure Compute, Microsoft Azure Networking, and Microsoft Quantum.BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary.From Canada, currently based out of Seattle…
News
Laptops all have built-in security tokens these days
I've been a fan of security tokens for a decade now and have accrued quite a collection. This redundancy isn't a bad thing, as security tokens are easily misplaced and the only way to recover from a lost token is using a second token that is also register
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Let go of StackOverflow; communities must take ownership
Despite the title this is less a directive and more a description of what has already happened, and how I came to realize it. Still, there are many who remember StackOverflow as a revelation in the mid-2010s and think some vestige of those times remain. T
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A supposedly worthwhile contract I'll never do again
Here I'll talk about a type of TLA contract I've worked on a few times, and why it didn't work out as well as hoped. I'm not trying to torpedo other peoples' contracts here - I just hope to share this experience so others can structure their TLA contracts
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The current state of TLA development
The 2025 TLA Community Event was held last week on May 4th at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It was a satellite event to ETAPS 2025 , which I also attended, and plan to write about in the near future. I gave a talk somewhat-hucksterishl
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TLA is more than a DSL for breadth-first search
Although it isn't usually taught that way, a lot of TLA newcomers develop the understanding that TLA is just a fancy domain-specific language (DSL) for breadth-first search. If you want to model all possible executions of a concurrent system - so the thin
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TLA Unicode support
TLA was developed by Leslie Lamport, originator of (LaTeX), so it's unsurprising that TLA syntax looks pretty (LaTeX)-y. It's a very mathy language, with much use of symbols like (among others) A , E , / , / , and in denoting (forall), (exists), (land), (
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Wrangling monotonic systems in TLA
TLA sees a lot of use modeling distributed systems. The ability to explore all possible interleavings of events makes concurrency simple to reason about. For this TLA uses something called finite model-checking, which is really just a breadth-first search
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FOSS I Love
Here I'll write an ode to two closely-linked FOSS projects that have, recently, absolutely floored me with their competence & quality: Sunshine and Moonlight . These are used to stream video games over a (usually local) network. Sunshine is a game streami
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Inlining SVGs for Dark Mode
I will here indulge in the traditional practice of using my blog to talk about how I'm using my blog. This page is built with the Hugo static site generator. I recently updated it to use the latest version of the beautifulhugo theme , which unbeknownst to
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Using TLA at Work
Here's a short report of a time I used TLA at work, with interesting results. TLA is a formal specification language that is particularly effective when applied to concurrent & distributed systems. TLA made it tractable for an ordinary software engineer t
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