Hillel Wayne

I am delighted to announce that my book, Logic for Programmers , is now available! You can check out the release site here or go directly to buy the ebook or print versions . If you bought any of the early access versions, you can get the 1.0 for free fro

Empirical Software Engineering is the study of what actually works in programming. Instead of trusting our instincts we collect data, run studies, and peer-review our results. This talk is all about how we empirically find the facts in software and some o

It's April Cools ! It's like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that's different from what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about The best introductory video games for non-gamers . This year I'm picking a

As part of writing Logic for Programmers I produced a lot of "chaff", code samples and sections I wrote up and then threw away. Sometimes I found a better example for the same topic, sometimes I threw the topic away entirely. It felt bad to let everything

I love science. Not the "space is beautiful" faux-science, but the process of doing science. Hours spent calibrating equipment, cross-checking cites of cites of cites, tedious arguments about p-values and prediction intervals, all the stuff that makes sci

I think by hand. It's easier for me to write my first drafts on a tablet and type them up afterwards. I can't do this with code, though. Here's me scrawling out a python function as fast as possible:That took three times longer to write than type. Somethi

For latency, anyway.A common architecture pattern is the "task queue": tasks enter an ordered queue, workers pop tasks and process them. This pattern is used everywhere from distributed systems to thread pools. It applies just as well to human systems, li

Been quiet around here! I've been putting almost all of my writing time into Logic for Programmers and my whole brain is book-shaped. Trust me, you do not want to read my 2000-word rant on Sphinx post-build LaTeX customization. But I spent the past week i

Let's make the CPython team regret adding pattern matching to Python!