Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2020. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new. *also: see the lists from [2019](http://blog.fogus.me/2019/12/30/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2019/), [2018](http://blog.fogus.me/2019/01/02/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2018/), [2017](http://blog.fogus.me/2018/01/02/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2017/), [2016](http://blog.fogus.me/2016/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2016/), [2015](http://blog.fogus.me/2015/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2015/), [2014](http://blog.fogus.me/2014/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2014/), [2013](http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2013/), [2012](http://blog.fogus.me/2012/12/26/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2012/), [2011](http://blog.fogus.me/2011/12/31/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2011/) and [2010](http://blog.fogus.me/2010/12/30/the-best-things-in-2010/)* ## Great blog-posts / articles read * *[The Octopus: An Alien Among Us](https://lithub.com/the-octopus-an-alien-among-us/)* - *for biology-curious goofs[^bio] such as myself, the octopus is a fascinating example of aliens among us. no chimera was half as interesting.* * *[A Conversation with Arthur Whitney](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242)* - *computing luminary and designer of the [A+](http://www.aplusdev.org/Develop/devTeam.html), k, and q languages as well as an [early contributor to J](https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum) speaks about his life and contributions to computing and also that he never writes buggy code.* * *[The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-true-glamour-of-clarice-lispector)* - *a portrait of a brilliant author who's characters lived and experienced life as the author experienced it. her body of work is a record of her life.* * *[Mark I FORTH Computer](http://www.aholme.co.uk/Mk1/Architecture.htm)* - *a home-brewed forth computer using discrete components.* * *[Art Bell and the Eerie Joy of Late Night Radio](https://medium.com/pop-off/art-bell-and-the-eerie-joy-of-late-night-radio-8e4476d00e4b)* - *as a college student i would often spend my nights slinging code, working proofs, and writing essays long into the night. my background sounds of choice were the dulcet tones of Art Bell, the original host of Coast to Coast AM and lover of all things weird. while most of the content of his shows were far-fetched at best, i couldn't help but marvel at the possibilities of a world that was much more interesting than the one in which i lived.* * *[How is the Linux Kernel Tested?](https://embeddedbits.org/how-is-the-linux-kernel-tested/)* - *from linus' gut to static analysis to automated testing to continuous integration to people running commands.* * *[The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk](http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914)* - *Allen Wirfs-Brock responds to Gilad Bracha's perspective on the subject, providing his own perspective in the process. interestingly what Smalltalk brought to computing was probably more important than Smalltalk itself.* * *[A Constructive Look at TempleOS](http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/)* - *TempleOS is a legend in the weird world of hobby osdev and its developer [Terry Davis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis) (RIP) was as prolific as he was controversial (i.e. massively). the operating system is an altar (in more ways than one) to eccentricity and was developed with a singular focus on speed and direct hardware access.* [^losethos] * *[Cemetery of Soviet Computers](https://rusue.com/cemetery-of-soviet-computers/)* - *a retrocomputing bonanza of defunct Soviet computer systems found in a dilapidated building somewhere in Russia.* * *[How SHRDLU Got Its Name](http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/name.html)* - *Terry Winograd explains how his blocks world program SHRDLU got its name.* [^blocks] * *[AI Ruined Chess, Now It's Making the Game Beautiful Again](https://www.wired.com/story/ai-ruined-chess-now-making-game-beautiful/)* - *how AlphaZero is used to explore odd variants of Chess, finding new patterns and in some cases reducing draws dramatically.* * *[Rewriting the Technical Interview](https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-interview)* - *a work of beautiful madness.* * *[thought leaders and chicken sexers](https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sexers.html)* by Zach Tellman - *an essay that takes on the topic of Paul Graham head on, especially in regard to his programming language experiment Arc. computerists of a certain vintage have a complex relationship with pg in that many of his early, mostly pseudo-technical writings were inspirational. however, over time his focus has changed to that of concerns of finance and thought-leadership thus leaving many who admired his technicalish essays alienated. Zach captures the spirit of that group well in both the content of the article and its subtext.* * *[I Could Do That in a Weekend](http://danluu.com/sounds-easy/)* - *if you've spent any time at all on the internet then you've likely heard the phrase "i could do that in a weekend" -- the battle cry of the dickweed. Dan Luu talks about the difference between happy-paths and real work required to make modern software systems.* [^bio]: "biology-curious" meant to convey that I'm far below even an amateur in the field. [^losethos]: I came across Terry Davis many years ago when TempleOS was known as Losethos. He was an interesting person to correspond with as at the time he would often respond with incredibly long paragraphs of Markovian nonsense generated by a program he called "Word of God." [^blocks]: Blocks World was a project that i did as one of my undergraduate independent studies. over the years i've gone back to this code writing and rewriting its guts. it's a challenging task but not world-shattering and i find working on it better than jigsaw puzzles. ## Most viewed blog posts by me I’ve been trying something new over the past couple of years. That is, I’ve been posting threads and such on [my Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/fogus) with a small handful of posts here That said, there were a few high-traffic posts on my blog. * *[ToriLisp - an ersatz LISP for little birds](http://blog.fogus.me/2020/12/22/torilisp-an-ersatz-lisp-for-tiny-birds/)* - *my final post of 2020 turned out to be my most popular. this one described a little programming language that I created over the course of the year and the motivations behind it.* * *[Six Works of Computer Science Fiction](http://blog.fogus.me/2015/04/27/six-works-of-computer-science-fiction/)* - *an older post that discusses computer science books describing systems that couldn't possibly be real -- except that they are!* * *[Walking the Clojure Source History (a talk not given)](http://blog.fogus.me/2020/05/01/walking-the-clojure-source-history-a-talk-not-given/)* - *some images of notebook pages with notes about the commit history of Clojure during its early days. the notes were in service to a conference talk that i never gave.* * *[8-bit Spirituals](http://blog.fogus.me/2020/05/20/8-bit-spirituals/)* - *a short discussion about old 8-bit programs and the gestalt of the small, yet feature-rich, in programming and some modern examples that fit this mold.*[^8bs] [^8bs]: i'd like to continue pulling on this thread but it seems that the love of this ideal is not as widespread as i had hoped. ## Favorite technical books discovered (and read) I’ve intentionally reduced the number of technical books that I consume, but there are a few that I “found” in 2020 that stood out. * *[UNIX: A History and a Memoir](https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552?tag=fogus-20)* by Brian Kernigan - *this was much better than i thought it would be. regardless of how you view UNIX the anecdotes and stories are worth reading.* * *[Introduction to Very Large Scale Integration Systems