Now

What I am up to right now (updated weekly; last update: 14 May 2019). Inspired by Derek Sivers.

I live in Conway, Arkansas with my wife and two sons (ages 7 years and 19 months), where I am an assistant professor of computer science at Hendrix College.

Projects

Right now I’m working most intensely on disco, a functional teaching language for discrete mathematics I’ve been developing. At the moment I am focused mostly on developing a coherent story around built-in collection types (lists, bags, and sets). This summer I plan to put in a lot of time working on user-facing aspects of the language, i.e. interface, help, documentation, and errors.

I enjoy solving problems on Open Kattis, for fun, learning, and as preparation for teaching Algorithms and coaching the Hendrix programming team. I’ve also started a series of blog posts on how to solve competitive programming problems in Haskell.

Chris Chalmers has been working on a rewrite of some of the core functionality of the diagrams library, which will allow for things like traversals over diagrams and diagram edits; get rid of the backend type parameter for diagrams (which was more of a nuisance than a help); and incidentally split out all the purely geometric parts of the library into a separate package. We’re working on getting everything cleaned up, documented, etc. so we can hopefully release a new version this summer.

I’m in the middle of a very long series of blog posts on The Math Less Traveled exploring primality testing algorithms, and have been lately following a few other tangents as well.

Reading

Things I’m reading right now (some more sporadically than others):