Now
What I am up to right now (updated weekly; last update: 6 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’m also preparing to give a remote talk at ICFP in October on my JFP paper, “You Could Have Invented Fenwick Trees”.
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
- Witch King by Martha Wells
- 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