Some talks I've given. Mostly on programming.

In this repository:

• Blame: In search of the root causes of software failure (and success)

  The overdoses caused burns and radiation poisoning. Three of the patients died. These accidents were the worst in the history of radiation medicine.

  This talk is in two parts. The first half is about this medical device and why it malfunctioned. The second half is about what safety means now, whether things are any better in 2017 than they were in 1982.

• Meltdown and Spectre in 5 minutes

  Now we're in a scenario from a science fiction story. You're an evil secret agent, and you've obtained the top-secret information! But the universe you're living in is a spurious universe. A mistake universe. Mere nanoseconds from now, the CPU is going to detect the mistake and roll all this back...

• <textarea distributed>

  And it's at this point that I get a little frustrated. Why is this so hard? All we want to do is edit a text file. This should be easy. Instead we keep failing. Just one approach after another stinks, and the kids are starting to ask their mother, "Why is daddy so angry all the time?"

• Sharing and mutability in Rust

  Rust makes it easy to implement purely functional data structures... and then mutate them.

• Algebraic data types

  People call programming language features "powerful" a lot. I think the word is overused.

  Algebraic data types are the real thing.

Elsewhere:

• Alternate futures: game-playing AI in JavaScript

  The shape of the future, then, is this branching shape I like to call the galactic time squid.

  It's a technical term.

  Some people call it a "tree".

• GC in 50 lines

  As an application programmer, you don’t do memory management for every single object in your program. But somebody has to. The system does it for you. Right?

  How does that work?

• What's known about tutoring

  Like white-hat hackers, expert tutors are taking valuable supervillain skills and using them for good.

• Sorting and searching at the library

  When I started at the library, there was this moment, embarrassing now in hindsight, when I thought, hey, I know information systems. I could teach the library a thing or two! But of course, predictably, it turned out the library had something to teach me.