Now
What I am up to right now (updated weekly; last update: 20 January 2025). Inspired by Derek Sivers.
I live in Conway, Arkansas with my wife and three children (ages 13, 7, and 4), where I am an associate professor of computer science at Hendrix College.
Teaching
This spring, 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.
I continue to develop disco, a functional teaching language for discrete mathematics. For the next few weeks I will be focused particularly on improving the language’s user-friendliness to prepare for teaching with it in the spring.
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 will be giving a virtual talk at Portland State on January 30th, and then plan to submit a paper to ICFP.
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, on average.
We will be hosting the second annual Hendrix College Programming Contest on March 15, so over the next couple months I will be working on preparing for that.
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.
Reading/Playing
Things I’m reading or playing right now: