Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc.
in 2023. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
also: see the lists from 2022,
2021,
2020,
2019,
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011
and 2010
I’m releasing this year’s post early due to upcoming travel, so
please hold off creating great works for me to discover until the new
year!
Great posts | articles |
talks read/watched
- Atari
2600 Hardware Design: Making Something out of (Almost) Nothing
- Explains the operation and programability of the Atari 2600 and
the amazing feats of efficiency required to make games for the
platform.
- Zen-Gun
and The Zen Gun - Barrington Bayley’s The Zen Gun is a
personal favorite work of science fiction that I see very little chatter
about. This post nicely captures what drew me to it and continues to
inspire love in me.
- My
secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop - As a child of the
BBS era I recall fondly the pre-ubiquitous-WWW days. There was something
special about the cozy confines of local BBS systems. I can clearly
remember sneaking into the kitchen to disable the phone ringer so that
friends could call into my small BBS (TriBBS 4ever!) to chat and play a
few games.
- The
History of Wordstar by Bradford Morgan White - Wordstar was
the first word processing applications that I ever used. My friend and
neighbor had a Commodore 128 and his father had a version that ran on
the alternate Z80 mode that my friend used for writing projects. We also
used Wordstar to make D&D character sheets and other role-playing
ephemera and I remember loving it. I’ve never found word processing that
I liked better.
- Whole Earth Index -
I was born too late to get the full Whole Earth Catalog experience,
but dusty copies made their way amongst me and my friends in high
school. I loved the aesthetics and the entire project was a revelation
to an impressionable younger me.
- Unsolved Problems in
Playing-Card Research - It’s unclear to me how
comprehensive this list is or even if the problems listed are still
unsolved. That said, as a fan of playing cards and tangentially the
history of the pasteboard lovelies so tracing these trails was a weekend
well spent for me.
- What
Happens When a QAnon Cult Leader Moves Into Town - Wherever
the self-proclaimed queen of Canada goes, chaos follows.
- The
Origins of the Steam Engine by Anton Howes and Matt Brown -
In another life I could imagine myself working with or in
association with steam engines of some sort or another.
Most viewed blog posts by me
- Code
Riffs - Whereby I describe the idea of a code riff – a
fragment of code that illustrates a singular notion beautifully and, if
possible, amusingly.
- Languages
Zoo - Describes the programming languages projects that I’m
perpetually hacking on for fun.
- Pyramid
Game Designs - Descriptions of little tabletop games design
for Looney
Pyramids.
- RIP,
Prince Joli Quentin Kansil - Joli Quentin Kansil was an
anachronistic tabletop game designer who passed away in 2023 and shall
be missed by a fervent handful of gaming freaks like myself.
Favorite
technical (and technical-adjacent) books discovered (and read)
- The
Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook by Ward Farnsworth -
A great book on thinking about thinking centered around the Socratic
Method of inquiry. This books spread like wild fire through my work team
and I’m glad that I eventually read it as well.
Favorite non-technical books
read
- Copsford
by Walter J.C. Murray - If you liked Walden by Thoreau then you may
like Copsford. The book is a memoir of Murray attempting to life a
rustic life selling wild herbs and waging war on a rat infestation. I
couldn’t put it down.
- Hadrian
the Seventh by Baron Corvo - Frederic Rolfe, aka Baron
Corvo, was a troubled author who, in-between his limitless bouts of
drama, created some beautiful works of fiction. Chief among his books is
this tale of an unknown Catholic priest who suddenly rises to Pope.
Rolfe was a fallen priest who used the narrative to invoke revenge on
the Catholics and institutions that spurned him.
- The
Book of Jade by David Park Barnitz - This is a book of
decadent poetry that takes highlights the depths of morbid beauty that
fin de siècle was famous for. There was a time in my youth when I
discovered Baudelaire’s Les
Fleurs Du Mal and it struck a chord in me, but it took me decades to
find another work that rose to that level.
- The
Wall by Marlen Haushofer - The book follows an unnamed
chracter who finds herself trapped behind an invisible barrier
surrounding a tract of land at the same moment that (seemingly) the
world outside dies. The story follows her day to day trials of survival
and goes deep into her self-realization as possibly the last human on
earth. Fair warning. When I say it follows her activities I really mean
it. It often goes moment to moment tracing her daily routines and
thoughts. I personally enjoyed that depth view but others waiting for
“something to happen” may not. The book is a masterclass of exploration
of motherhood and my book of the year.
Number of books written or
published
0
Number of programming
languages designed
½ a language + ½ of another language, both being concatenative, one
being imperative and the other functional. I’d like to hack on these
over the holiday break. See more about these below.
Favorite music discovered
- Krautrocksampler:
One Head’s Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik by Julian Cope -
Cope’s exploration of Kosmische Musik was a much welcomed survey of
the depths of this somewhat obscure 1970s branch of progressive rock
that incorporated elements of Jazz, drone, and ambient. I’ve come to
love too many bands from this book to list individually.
Favorite show about
a disheveled detective
Columbo
Favorite films discovered
- Possession
directed by Andrzej Żuławski - A twisted tale of the effects of the
gnarled finger of the cosmos reaching down and touching the lives of two
people in love.
- A
Quiet Place in the Country by Elio Petri - If you’re a fan
of Italian giallo films then this one may be for you. This is a somewhat
more artistic take on the genre, but it works!
- The Green
Knight directed by David Lowery - This is one of those
films that I’ve felt compelled to watch numerous times in an attempt to
find more depth in its intricacies. This one has stuck with me many
months later. I found an excellent Green Knight
deep-dive on YouTube that has enhanced the experience of the film
for me.
- The
Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski - This film follows the occult
happenings of a rare book dealer and while quite slow, I found it
riveting. The Ninth Gate pushes so many of my hot-topic buttons, but
chiefly: esoterica, the supernatural, and bibliomania.
Favorite podcasts
- The Art of
Darkness - Kevin Kautzman and Brad Kelly look at the
underbelly of the creative process and what it takes, and takes out of
the creators, to create something significant and lasting.
- Trickster: The Many
Lives of Carlos Castaneda - A multi-episode look into
the life, works, and controversies of Carlos Castaneda. Like many other,
I discovered his Don Juan books at an impressionable age and was
instantly enraptured.
Favorite games discovered
- Iberian
Gauge designed by Amabel Holland - My weekly game group
reformed after a mutli-year COVID-initiated hiatus and while we’ve only
met a few times since, I did find a new train game to love. Iberian
Gauge is an interesting investment game with non-obvious tactics that
needs many more plays to clarify in my mind.
- Forth - I
mostly spent my time going through the 79 and 83 standards in for the
purpose of noodling about kernel-forths and the like. I’ve started on a
basic implementation of my own version but have gotten side-tracked by
interesting meta considerations.
- Joy
- Concurrent to the Forth studies I’ve gone back to looking at its
more functional cousin Joy. Much of the same meta-considerations have
gotten in the way but I found it much easier to spike a PoC for Joy.
I’ve been playing around with the idea of local binding via some sort of
stack destructuring but haven’t fleshed out the edge-cases yet. More to
come (hopefully).
- Java
- Most of my programming in 2023 has been in Java while working deep
in the Clojure compiler.
- Clojure - 2023 marks the
14th year as a full-time Clojure programmer
and the 1st year as a full-time Clojure core developer.
- ClojureScript -
Less-so now than when I was consulting full-time but I occasionally
dig into explore the implications of changes to Clojure on
CLJS.
- Datalog - The Datomic
flavor of Datalog is the flavor of choice for database access, be it
in-process or in the cloud. Again, my day-to-day usage is limited, but I
have my share of personal databases hosted on Datomic.
- Babashka -
I’ve used it a few times to throw together a few useful Clojure
scripts like data generation and the like. It’s good fun and now a part
of my programming utility belt. I hope to find more uses in
2024.
- Zig - The promise of
using Zig for kernel development is alluring!
Favorite papers discovered
(and read)
- Behavior,
Purpose and Teleology by Rosenblueth, Wiener, & Bigelow -
An early paper that helped outline a set of general techniques
applicable to using negative feedback in the sciences. I would like to
dive deeper into Cybernetics in 2024 and this paper was a good start in
that direction.
Still haven’t read…
I Ching, A Fire upon the Deep, Don Quixote, and a
boat-load of sci-fi
Favorite technical
conference attended
Favorite code read
- Elite
for Emacs - I was a big fan of Elite 1-million years ago
and so this Emacs mode providing a playable ASCII-based version was a
fun read.
- Doug Lenat’s
source code for AM and possibly EURISKO - Historically
relevant and inscrutable. EURISKO is written in Interlisp
- MicroTCP -
I’m a sucker for mini networking stacks and here is yet another that
grabbed my attention.
- New
language features since Java 8 to 21 - Trying to up my game
in understanding the features and their motivating forces introduced
into Java since version 8.
- ECMAchine -
An in-browser Scheme REPL that is also a toy operating system –
wonderfully bonkers!
- milliForth
- A truly beautiful and minimalist Forth.
Life-changing technology
“discovered”
- Discord - I’ve run a
small Discord server for most of the year and have participated in a few
others. These have completely replaced the interactions that I used to
get from Twitter.
- Dip pens - Taking my fountain pen game
to the next (lower) level.
State of plans from 2023
- Help get 1-2 Clojure releases out the door - Clojure 1.12.0
has been a long process, but it stands to be the biggest releases in
years. We’re very excited to share with the world.
- Write a gigantic post about cyberpunk. - Research continues
and it’s grown into a massive effort. Fun stuff!
- Post more about REPLs - This one was technically a fail,
but on the other hand the Clojure team did release Morse, which I call a
win!
- Reboot the effort of writing and publishing a paper - No
traction on this at all, but as it stands my writing motivations have
been pointed more toward non-technical topics lately.
- Play more baseball - I trained over the winter to play in
the summer but didn’t have time to get onto the field. :(
Plans for 2024
- Clojure 1.12 - This will happen soon.
- Go much deeper down the concatenative rabbit-hole - With
two languages in the works and excitement in a WiP Pi-based Forth OS, this
can’t possibly fail to succeed.
- Publish even more non-technical writing - I plan to spend a
couple of days at the Georgetown University library researching some
manuscripts and letters from Baron Corvo which will sow the seeds for
some work in this direction.
2023 Tech Radar
- try: Zig - I’ve been reading a bit
of Zig lately and have enjoyed it so far.
- adopt: ChatGPT - There are
ways to leverage this technology in more interesting ways than I have so
far, I just need to find them.
- assess: Light
Phone 2 - I would like to scale back my phone usage.
- hold: Joy of Clojure 3rd
edition - Indefinitely.
- stop: X - I will occasionally
check it because there are some interesting people whom I admire still
interacting, but I plan to not interacting myself.
People
who inspired me in 2023 (in no particular order)
Yuki, Keita, Shota, Craig Andera, Carin Meier, Justin Gehtland, Rich
Hickey, Nick Bentley, Paula Gearon, Zeeshan Lakhani, Brian Goetz, David
Nolen, Jeb Beich, Paul Greenhill, Kristin Looney, Andy Looney, Kurt
Christensen, Samm Deighan, David Chelimsky, Chas Emerick, Stacey Abrams,
Paul deGrandis, Nada Amin, Michiel Borkent, Alvaro Videla, Slava Pestov,
Yoko Harada, Mike Fikes, Dan De Aguiar, Christian Romney, Russ Olsen,
Alex Miller, Adam Friedman, Tracie Harris, Alan Kay, Janet A. Carr,
Wayne Applewhite, Naoko Higashide, Zach Tellman, Nate Prawdzik, JF
Martel, Phil Ford, Nate Hayden, Sean Ross, Tim Good, Chris Redinger,
Steve Jensen, Jordan Miller, Tim Ewald, Stu Halloway, Jack Rusher,
Michael Berstein, Benoît Fleury, Rafael Ferreira, Robert Randolph, Joe
Lane, Lisa Monaghan, Renee Lee, Pedro Matiello, Jarrod Taylor, Jaret
Binford, John Cooper, Conrad Barski, Amabel Holland, Ben Kamphaus.
Onward to 2024!
:F