Maybe longer. It’s not very good but it was the best I could do, and I could never bring myself to go back and revise it.
So today it goes out, the way I wrote and felt it then.
« Posts under Happenings
Published in ACM Crossroads
The article that I mentioned in my last post has been published in the Fall 2009 issue of ACM Crossroads:
http://mags.acm.org/crossroads/2009fall
You can jump to it by clicking on the “Career Advice: …” link on the front cover. Unfortunately, I no longer have a print subscription to Crossroads, so I won’t get to see my work on paper. But I know it’s out there 
Now to start working on the next one…
It worked.
I am apparently going to have an article published in the fall edition of magazine which I will leave unnamed until the issue is actually released. I don’t want to jinx it.
I think I’m going to work on the powerlifting article next. I also had a bit of inspiration at the 2009 Toronto Code retreat, where I threw together a solution to Conway’s Game of Life using signal processing primitives from SICP (unfold, map, reduce, etc) in Python. I should probably write that up as well.
Finally, I’ve been putting a lot of my spare effort into a script for a videogame… so looks like the writing bug has hit for realz. It’ll probably get even worse when the sun disappears and I stop spending so much time on the beach.
He’s not dead, he’s just gone somewhere else
There hasn’t been much activity here recently, but this was actually a conscious decision instead of one of the ‘life is overwhelming me’ variety.
I decided after writing my last post (sometime briefly after gunpowder was invented) that the amount of effort that I was putting into my blog posts rivalled that which would be required to get published, like, for real. Even if this wasn’t evident from the content.
So, it’s probably going to be quiet around here more often than not in the future. I’m going to try to focus on getting a couple of articles published each year, at minimum. I just finished and submitted my first one, so fingers are crossed there. My next one isn’t going to be on software at all, but instead on my introduction to the gentle art of powerlifting.
There, I went and said it. That means that I have to do it now.
More as it happens.
Super-cool stuff happening in OCaml-land!
Some things I tripped over in the past couple of months that I was surprised and stoked about:
- Jason Hickey has been improving his OCaml textbook, and it’s going to be published soon. I’ve been through most of the present draft, and the book has really gotten a lot better. It’s a great reference and learning aid. The draft is currently available on his homepage..
- Jane’s Street Capital is sponsoring some hella cool OCaml projects, two of which I’ve wanted to see forever. The first is a Dr-Schemish environment and learning progression for OCaml, which I think would be a fantastic way to introduce people to the language, to functional programming, and to computer science in general. And of course, the concurrent GC would potentially be stellar as well, although I have to admit I seriously doubt that this one will ever fly. If they pull it off, I will certainly send the team some small token of my astonished respect for them.
An interesting thing to note is that several of these projects, if successful, would probably result in a fork of OCaml, given that new stuff from outside groups tends not to be included in the official distro. My opinion only, of course, and I’m hardly an expert on OCaml politics.
If even one of those Jane’s Capital projects works out, I will be extremely happy. This is my official wish of good luck to all of the teams involved.
Rock.