The blog posts I haven't written (yet)

It surprises me when I hear people say they want to write more but never know what to write about. I have the opposite problem! Whenever an idea keeps popping into my head, I add it to a note on my phone. Currently, it has over 120 ideas for blog posts that I would like to write someday, though at this rate, I probably won't.

In the essence of working in public, I'm sharing my list, much like I shared my career rejections and my app ideas. The list is unordered and quite vague, but a rough idea is how all my blog posts start. If you'd like me to prioritize writing one soon, please let me know!

• Porting llm.c to Visual Basic
• A deep dive into the Hedy programming language
• Academia vs big tech vs startup
• Lessons my students taught me
• Active documentation
• The projects that taught me programming
• Excel as a general purpose language
• Zero-progress days
• Where is the proactive AI?
• How I write
• My students are smarter than me
• Python's AST package
• Techniques for autograding student code
• How getting lost in code can be beneficial
• You have to express intent somehow
• Making my own web language
• Lessons learned integrating B2B software
• The paradox of self-service products
• Parsing numbers
• Book summaries (series):
  • The programmer's brain
  • A field guide to understanding human error
  • The design of everyday things
• My model of group software projects
• A framework for writing tool papers
• The idea garden
• Reactive vs proactive
• Simulating board games in code
• Parsing for $1 a day
• Advice for new faculty
• "Fostering" innovation
• "Incremental" research
• "Boring" tech
• Looking back at 100 blog posts
• Innovation amongst bureaucracy
• Beyond chat: Pointing, annotating, and interrupting
• Mentoring PhD students
• Bottom-up versus top-down design: Research, products, games
• Timeless programming [projects]
• Grad school or startup?
• Personifying compiler error messages
• Esoteric programming language on top of ChatGPT
• Quiet AI: So good you don't notice it
• 20 small fixes for XCode
• Embed your own DSL into Python
• Laziest compiler ever
• How does Pandas defy Python?
• Writing is thinking is procrastinating
• Undo redo literature review
• The economics of being a professor, time and money
• Personal GUI tools, a response
• Revolutionizing the code editor, one micro step at a time
• Why we will fail: A pre-mortem exercise
• Using nudges to accelerate code reviews at scale
• The evolution of type hints in Python
• Gulfs of programming environments
• My oversimplified guide to technical writing
• The pendulum between innovation and execution
• Learn to be a user researcher in 5 minutes
• The imagination gap
• Premature commitment
• Why can't I code in Excel like this?
• Copilot for code golf
• Is user error a myth?
• Explain it like I'm 5: Program synthesis
• Self-explanation literature review
• 30 days to make $1 from a product
• The future of programming by example
• Storytelling in academic papers
• Industry job search as an academic
• Talking to software engineers
• Why is documentation so hard?
• A tale of three todo list apps
• Are we inventing on principle yet?
• Git has usability problems
• The value of "it just works"
• Every possible limitation of programmer user studies
• Resilience engineering the classroom
• Programming pitfalls we all hit eventually
• The challenges of studying COBOL programmers
• The four levels of research prototypes
• Usability problems with Copilot
• A gentle introduction to type systems
• Lessons from teaching software engineering
• The best code editor features in the last 10 years
• Software engineering versus software engineering research
• A dream job: Skunkworks
• A dream job: Teaching
• Strategies for prototyping really fast
• Type inference still has usability problems
• My experiment with a everything-explicit language
• The problem I have with software engineering books
• Muscles for coding? Timed repetition of coding exercises
• What to do next on your personal project
• Everything you would ever want to know about random numbers
• Literature review on code navigation
• Let's expand the Teeny Tiny compiler (series):
  • Abstract syntax tree
  • Type checking
  • Functions
  • Standard library
  • Optimizations
  • Error messages
• Unintended consequences in design
• Exploding a recursive descent parser
• Why do I make so many compilers?
• Abstractions on top of C
• Make it real: Add polish to your prototype
• Minimalist learning theory and production bias
• My favorite leetcode problems
• Transferability of PL skills
• Absurd language comparisons (series):
  • Swift vs Intel assembly
  • OCaml vs Visual Basic
  • Zig vs PHP
• Every possible error handling pattern
• Problems I faced learning Rust
• Let's build a teeny database
• Let's build a teeny text editor
• Stories from disgruntled developers
• Exceptions have usability problems
• What I wish undergrads knew about software engineering
• Solo hackathons
• Visuals of game development (series): parallax, particle emitters, camera effects, smoothing functions
• The fun test for game prototypes
• Everything you would ever want to know about modulo
• I over-engineered a bloom filter
• The story of Patchworks
• Breaking the .net runtime
• Making an esoteric language and building something useful with it
• Peeking into CPython (series)