Now
What I am up to right now (updated weekly; last update: 29 April 2024). Inspired by Derek Sivers.
I live in Conway, Arkansas with my wife and three children (ages 12, 6, and 3), where I am an associate professor of computer science at Hendrix College.
Teaching
This spring I am teaching:
Classes are over, and now there are just a couple weeks of finals and grading left.
Projects
In the fall of 2021 I started developing a game called Swarm and built a small open-source community around its development. So far we have made a few official alpha releases, and development continues to hum along. Currently I’m working on adding recursive types to the language.
I continue to develop disco, a functional teaching language for discrete mathematics. I’m currently gearing up to work with several students over the summer on some Disco research and development projects, including:
- coverage/completeness checking for pattern-matching
- a solid semantic/theoretical basis for arithmetic patterns like f(2n+1) = n.
- incorporating random number generation into the language
- better support for generation and type-level description of combinatorial objects
Another research project I have been working on recently is making formal an intuitive sense I have that the types of DSLs involving an applicative functor can be fully inferred from programs that just use regular applicative notation, whereas for monads this is ambiguous.
I enjoy solving problems on Open Kattis, for fun, learning, and as preparation for teaching Algorithms and coaching the Hendrix programming team. I’ve committed to getting a minimum of 2 points per day.
After many years of hosting my two blogs on Wordpress, I’ve gotten completely sick of it and am slowly but surely building out some replacements with Hakyll.
Reading
Things I’m reading right now:
The Story of Proof: Logic and the History of Mathematics by John Stillwell
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Zeros and Ones by Sadie Plant
Playing
I’ve been playing Tears of the Kingdom since it came out in May 2023; as a completionist I’m trying my best to get it to 100% completion, which is a tall task for such an expansive game. So far I’ve played 270+ hours, and have completed the entire main storyline to the end credits, all shrines, lightroots, caves, main + side quests, + acquired all armor; now working my way through the remaining checklists (all Koroks, Addison signs, + defeating all minibosses).
I’ve also started playing a bit of Mario Wonder.
After completing those games (or maybe before, if I am impatient) I plan to next play Outer Wilds.