Now
What I am up to right now (updated weekly; last update: 1 July 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.
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 putting out an 0.6 release and writing a language reference, then plan to work on improvements to the DSL for describing procedurally generated worlds.
I continue to develop disco, a functional teaching language for discrete mathematics. I’m currently working 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.
I’ve finally finished recreating my academic blog with Hakyll and have begun again writing some posts about competitive programming in Haskell. I’m in the very early stages of turning the material into a book.