When I was young, I learned that P.S. was used to attach an additional message at the end of a letter or email. I vaguely remember hearing it on the television. But, I was never taught what P.S. meant. It all started with a blog post, as it often does. I was thinking about whethe … | Continue reading
My meal arrived on the plane. I like airline food. I was served a chicken and pasta meal, coleslaw, an apple and custard crunch dessert, bread, and water. I should note that the proportions of chicken to pasta were heavily favoured toward pasta, but that was okay. For the best pa … | Continue reading
Next time you make a cup of coffee, take a moment to reflect on the experience. Do you start drinking the coffee when it is a bit too hot? Do you wait until the temperature is just right? Do you forget about the coffee but drink it anyway? How does the cup feel against your lips? … | Continue reading
Travel is a between space: the thing on which you want to focus is the future, but there are logistics in the moment that one must consider. I enjoy this liminality and the surprise moments of peace between the bustle. This morning, I woke up early -- before 5am -- and sprung to … | Continue reading
One of the joys and the promise of developing programming languages is that you can develop your own way to interface with a computer. I have seen two opportunities to explore programming language design to fill gaps I have seen. I built an abstract language for computer vision t … | Continue reading
Today, sitting on a comfortable bed in a hotel room, I have been reading and watching videos about philosophy: existentialism, (optimistic) nihilism; Satre, Camus. Also, I have been watching videos on computer science. I was hoping to find a coding project on which to work, an ac … | Continue reading
I have been coding since I was eight or nine years old. I started with drag-and-drop programming, trying to figure out how to make a game in a tool called Microsoft TouchDevelop. I recall making one or two things, but I mostly tinkered with what was made by the community; there w … | Continue reading
When I was young, in the mid 2000s, I used computers to navigate four websites: the BBC kids games, the PBS kids games, and, later, the NASA Hubble Telescope photographs and Club Penguin. The BBC, PBS, and Club Penguin websites were about entertainment. I could sit on the family … | Continue reading
One of my graphic communication teachers in high school had an exercise that they would use, I think, to spark ideas: put your pen on the page, then start drawing. Go in circles. Let the pen flow. Pay no regard to trying to make anything in particular, instead embracing the rando … | Continue reading
One of the things I love about poetry is you can set out with a theme in mind and, through the limitations of rhyme, end up on a completely different -- but equally delightful -- track than you expected. I thought to myself "I would love to have a poem to end my web pages!" so I … | Continue reading
One of my favourite pastimes is clicking around the blogosphere, exploring and reading personal websites. I especially love encountering blogrolls or link lists, wherein a site owner links to other websites that may be of interest. I have maintained a blogroll listing some of the … | Continue reading
I sometimes think about the vast expanse of space. What it would be like to see something for the first time. A star. A planet. Then I looked around where I am. To the daffodils, the cherry blossoms on a particular tree, the leaves on a single tree on a familiar path. If I look c … | Continue reading
Before the bus leaves, there is a moment of stillness. The rain is coming down, lightly, but the sun peeks through the clouds. Meanwhile, I ponder: an adventure is afoot. There are memories to be made. There will be new opportunities to make people smile; to bring joy. The engine … | Continue reading
This is the third interview in Technical Writing Chats, a series where I speak with technical writers about their day-to-day role and how they got started in their career. Today's interview is with Sabrina Lim, a Senior Associate Technical Writer at Workday. I sincerely hope you … | Continue reading
When I write poetry, the text I write is (mostly) plain text. To publish poetry on my website, I need to add a bit of HTML. This HTML ensures that stanzas are properly formatted; otherwise, my plain text poetry may wrap or get smooshed together. (You can bet that this is the firs … | Continue reading
commuting in the evening: a liminal space a time that necessitates a new pace around are stories of people from yonder: kids playing, people working, interspersed with those who ponder. on the train, I have time to think; to be i think about everything from programming to poetry … | Continue reading
oh, this web we weave where we can share any idea of which we can conceive knowledge is free for one and all with plenty to inspire and enthrall serendipitious interactions around reveberating, with a delightful sound matters important, niche or sundry an hour spent: sweet like h … | Continue reading
(Not to be confused with Rubenerd and Clara's PenguinCoffee.) I have been experimenting with using my personal knowledge graph to write poetry this week. Using KGL, my knowledge graph query language, I can look up a concept, or a concept connected to another concept. I explored v … | Continue reading
eyes heavy i stayed up too late for: the internet! exciting as it is brilliant ideas(?) of vast varities: math, computing, humour. what i need right now the magic elixir java, joe, mud the caffeine, my driver my eyes are no longer heavy i now see the day ignited by a spark, I ask … | Continue reading
A radio station was playing through the speakers when I was standing in line in Greggs to buy my lunch. A familiar song played. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. One of those tiny moments where you say to yourself wait, then you light up a second later when you know … | Continue reading
A (brief) introduction to random boolean networks Random boolean networks follow a set of predefined rules. A network has: An initial state of N nodes, whose values may be set at random or loaded from a seed, and; A dictionary that connects each node to other nodes, and; A set of … | Continue reading
The last few days have been unseasonably rainy, interspersed with fog. This has me thinking about what feelings different weather patterns evoke. In the fog of the morning, I looked out the window with curiosity. What is out there? Really? I know the buildings. What stories are t … | Continue reading
discussions exchanged over Zoom in which ideas about the web do bloom our minds are focused on what we can make better the web, the most brilliant typesetter this is homebrew website club at which you can never except a snub for all web wanderers are welcome, young and old charac … | Continue reading
This is the second interview in Technical Writing Chats, a series where I speak with technical writers about their day-to-day role and how they got started in their career. Today's interview is with Nathan Driver, a Technical Writer for the UK Government Digital Services team. I … | Continue reading
to whom I gave a name my feline friend in our house, you laid claim (even if you, occasionally drove us around the bend) shy, at first, we all were then, over time: the precipice of a superbloom always, we took delight in your purr it was impossible for us to show gloom the wine … | Continue reading
discussions exchanged over Zoom in which ideas about the web do bloom our minds are focused on what we can make better the web, the most brilliant typesetter this is homebrew website club at which you can never except a snub for all web wanderers are welcome, young and old charac … | Continue reading
i (mostly) love the discussions about: movies we watched and the details we cannot remember and how we laugh about the missing details. i (absolutely) love the moments when: our personaliities superbloom and we realise we can be ourselves truly ourselves. the homecooked meals and … | Continue reading
This is the first interview in Technical Writing Chats, a series where I speak with technical writers about their day-to-day role and how they got started in their career. Today's interview is with Ally Sassman, a Senior Technical Writer at New Relic. I sincerely hope you enjoy! … | Continue reading
This is the story of how Lady Gaga music influenced my morning espresso, resulting in joy, a bad coffee, reminiscence, and humble lessons learned. It all started, as all stories do, with an errant audio transcription. In a data entry task at work, I listened to several autoplays … | Continue reading
I am fascinated by how programming languages help you express ideas. In my experiments with making programming languages, I like think about how I would want to represent a series of instructions, then use my experiences and expectations to come up with a syntax. When you design … | Continue reading
The ritual of making coffee is fascinating to me. I enjoy all of the steps in pursuit of the final cup: weighing and grinding the beans, putting the coffee in my espresso portafilter, making sure the coffee is even, tamping the coffee, brewing the coffee, steaming the milk, pouri … | Continue reading
I have many familiar paths: train rides, bus journeys, and pavements on which I have been countless times. On journeys traversing familiar paths, I like to look around to see what new things I can spot: buildings, paths, perspectives on the hills, and whatever else I can see. Ind … | Continue reading
I like to watch movies and write in the late evenings, into the wee hours of the night. This Saturday, I found myself more active than normal. I watched Clue, a comedy murder mystery movie based on the board game Cluedo. While the movie was not as funny as I had hoped, it was ent … | Continue reading
The convoluted and arguably superfluous nature of the title of this post is an apt reflection of my ambivalence associated with the use of braces in English prose. Earlier today, I blogged on the topic of braces {}, pondering the use -- and potential use -- of the braces. While u … | Continue reading
I have been interested in learning how to use Mermaid over the last week, a text-based diagramming tool. Mermaid lets you write a text description of a diagram. As a programmer, this is appealing: I can define graphs in a strict language and change them as I do any other piece of … | Continue reading
My website RSS feed used to publish a short excerpt of my blog posts. This was, approximately, the first paragraph of my blog posts. You could then click through to the full post to read more. The reason for this was I did not want my home page to show all of the text in my most … | Continue reading
This evening, I had a delightful discussion about programming language design. It was noted that some programming languages like C use curly braces. The curly braces have semantic meanings. In C, JavaScript, and other languages, curly braces denote a block of code. A block of cod … | Continue reading
When I am anxious, little moments of joy can help distract me from what is on my mind and bring me back to thinking more positively. In those (more) anxious times, the smile I show after hearing the birds chirp outside can be the difference between my ruminating and my feeling a … | Continue reading
Sometimes, the routine you need is not new, but one you had in the past and, for some reason, stopped. For the last few months, I have been reflecting on how I am less regimented than I once was. I am perhaps striving for equilibrium. My high school self was stricter than I ever … | Continue reading
For a while, I have been thinking about writing a post on reasons why you should write. Today, I reframed this idea into documenting the reasons why I write on this personal website. This newfound framing alleviated the mental block I had around this topic, giving way to my makin … | Continue reading
This is part two of a recurring series on programming language design, starting with my experiences building VisionScript, an abstract programming language for computer vision. With VisionScript, you can classify images, detect objects in images, do those things on camera feeds, … | Continue reading
Part of what I love about blogging is the tiny glimpses into others' lives. Sometimes, I read the writing of someone else and think "I do that, too!" or "I like that as well!" and feel a bit less lonely. Blogging, as Rebecca Toh says connects us to our shared humanity: I don’t kn … | Continue reading
Last year, I worked on a programming language called VisionScript. VisionScript is an abstract programming language for use in building computer vision applications. VisionScript is no longer in active development, but the spirit of the project -- abstracting computer vision into … | Continue reading
Sometimes, I wish I knew more about insert topic de jour. When I take a step back to think about this feeling, I realise that there is a bias at play: those that make something impressive did so with consistent practice and learning. No matter where you are -- treading grounds of … | Continue reading
On Mastodon, Katherine (side note: whose work on poetic programming is incredibly inspiring) asked: what's something that you're especially proud of on your personal website? it can be small or big To which I responded: I am proud that it feels like my own. This website is the pr … | Continue reading
This post is about anxiety and mental health. The sun is about to set over the hills, after a long day of rain. I hear birdsong. I smiled earlier at a few rap songs sent to me by a fellow blogger; the music seemed to fit the moment well. The deviation in genres of music to which … | Continue reading
I am working on a query languge for knowledge graphs: Knowledge Graph Language (KGL). My goal is to provide a concise way to retrieve information about specific items in a knowledge graph, explore the connections between nodes in the graph, and analyze properties of a graph such … | Continue reading
For most of my programming life, I have worked with the abstractions made by others. I have used tools that use well-researched and clearly defined data structures to solve problems, rather than learning about them myself. Indeed, abstraction lets me stand on the shoulders of gia … | Continue reading