Now
What I am up to right now (updated weekly; last update: 13 October 2025). Inspired by Derek Sivers.
I live in Conway, Arkansas with my wife and three children (ages 14, 8, and 4), where I am an associate professor of computer science at Hendrix College.
Teaching
This semester, I am teaching:
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 hard on adding an import feature to the language.
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 am now the chair of my department, which means I am currently spending time doing things like visiting classes and writing letters for colleagues up for evaluation this year.
Reading/Playing
Things I’m reading or playing right now:
- Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
- Subnautica
Music
Pieces I’m learning/practicing right now:
- Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 12 in A♭ major, Op. 26
- Rachmaninoff: Prelude in D major, Op. 23 No. 4
- Chopin: Concerto No. 1
- Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C# minor