Andy Wingo, a compiler engineer and Guile maintainer, writes about garbage collection, Scheme, WebAssembly, and language implementation.
Commenters list it among the best low-frequency blogs, and credit Wingo for turning Guile from a slow Scheme into one of the better choices.
If by "feminists" you mean GNU maintainers and other free software hackers (who may well be feminists, but this is a sharp subset of feminists in society as a whole), then correct, his personal political views are not by themselves the reason they want him out. It's the fact that he is so committed to the advocacy of his personal views that he is harming the free software movement. See, for instance, this post from the author of this email (and linked in this email): https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu
> The great tragedy of RMS's tenure in the supposedly universalist FSF and GNU projects is that he behaves in a way that is particularly alienating to women. It doesn't take a genius to conclude that if you're personally driving away potential collaborators, that's a bad thing for the organization, and actively harmful to the organization's goals: software freedom is a cause that is explicitly for everyone.
and this, from a former member of the FSF Board of Directors who resigned so he could speak up: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
> More importantly to the FSF, I attempted to persuade RMS that launching a controversial campaign on sexual behavior and morality was counter to his and FSF's mission to advance software freedom [....] After years of conversing with RMS about how his non-software-freedom views were a distraction, an indulgence, and downright problematic, his general response was to make even more public comments of…
Dan Luu has a list of programming blogs you might like: https://danluu.com/programming-blogs/. The rest of his blog is good too!
a few of my favorite blogs:
- http://blog.acolyer.org for fantastic daily summaries of CS papers.
- http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/ -- she has a business creating a new compression algorithm and I love reading about it
- https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ is pure gold for weird debugging stories
- https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/ is always a fun read
- http://wingolog.org/ on building compilers
- http://composition.al/blog -- Lindsey Kuper on her programming languages research
- aphyr's blog on distributed systems, of course
- https://charity.wtf/
- http://www.pgbovine.net/writings.htm -- Philip Guo is a CS professor whose blog on his experiences in academia I really like
- http://whilefalse.blogspot.com by Camille Fournier, mostly on engineering management
- http://larahogan.me/blog/ by Lara Hogan, on engineering management
Also I think this comment from Dan's blog (https://danluu.com/about/) is very true and important:
> I view that as a sign there’s a desperate shortage of understandable explanation of technical topics. There’s nothing here that most of my co-workers don’t know (with the exception of maybe three or four posts where I propose novel ideas). It’s just that they don’t blog and I do. I’m not going to try to convince you to start writing a blog, since that has to be something you want to do, but I will point out…
Hi Eric!
W.r.t. the co-op, at the moment my ideas (or fantasies) are more about organizational stuff than the content (what we would work on). I am just gathering ideas, learning and keeping my eyes open waiting for all this to crystalize...
My motivation is to be able to work with other people in a democratic and (internally) non-capitalistic way. You are still playing in the market so there are lots of contradictions that you would have to assume, but I think there is a lot of progress one can make nontheless. For me Igalia, as I mentioned, is a source of inspiration because they have been going for quite a while and they are about ~50 people now and have a good business. They are also very democratic and flat (e.g. everyone has equal pay, something shocking but with very good rationale). They also do excellent technical work---for example, they have been the ones implementing a lot of ES6 features inside V8 and SpiderMonkey. If you want to read about them, Andy Wingo (the person I know from there) has 3-post series on the topic here: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/05/no-master
On a more political side, recently I read the Telekommunisten manifesto which also touches on cooperative models as a way to do social change for real: http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/
In my student times I was very much into activism, but since I started working I stopped "having time" for it. I was also burned out from the energy and emotional sink that…
Here are some software engineering blogs from my RSS reader in addition to the ones listed in TFA. I honestly don't know how over or underrated they are, but I guess that varies depending on which communities you're closer to.
Mikola Lysenko https://0fps.net
Graphics programming, geometry and algorithms.
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Steven Wittens http://acko.net
Not underrated in any sense of the word, but I have to include it in case there are people who haven't seen it yet. It's about math and graphics, but also about art and design. Amazingly educational.
http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/ is a good starting point for new readers.
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Mark Nottingham https://www.mnot.net/blog/
Networking and HTTP.
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Jeff Preshing http://preshing.com
Efficient concurrent data structures.
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Bruce Dawson https://randomascii.wordpress.com
Software efficiency, performance optimization, fractals and more.
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Yann Collet http://fastcompression.blogspot.com
Modern compression algorithms.
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Gil Tene http://stuff-gil-says.blogspot.com
Also definitely not underrated, at least not in the Java world. But any engineer who cares about latency and honest benchmarks will benefit. Low latency techniques, GC performance, lock-free programming.
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Tony Finch http://fanf.livejournal.com
C and UNIX programming, and more.
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Andy Wingo https://wingolog.org
Scheme, Compilers, JavaScript, and much more.
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Aleksey Shipilёv http://shipilev.net
JDK internals, low-level optimization.
I'm a DevOps engineer. I totally buy duplication is better than the wrong abstraction but I'd like to nuance it: duplication is better than an abstraction used by two disparate parties (groups of people that don't talk to each other).
This is in agreement with Conway's law, which absolutely governs everything I do. I work on a DevOps team that supports several different development teams all working on different things. The code I write for those teams I often duplicate along team boundary lines. Build scripts, for example, I write and I put them in each team's git repository. These might look very similar. This allows the scripts to grow and change and evolve according to the different teams needs without the teams needing to talk to each other.
"Proper duplication" goes back to separation of concern. If you have two different concerns (using the lens of Conway's law, two very different teams) using the same code, perhaps they should not be using the same code because that is not a separation of concern. Separate the concerns by separating the code paths both concerns use.
This type of duplication is praised in more depth on wingolog[1]. I highly recommend reading it as something every engineer should read.
It's very important to know when to duplicate and when not to do so, because duplicating it the wrong time can lead to pain, but not duplicating can lead to pain also.
1: https://wingolog.org/archives/2015/11/09/embracing-conways-law
Guile is a great little Scheme. I found it to be a very welcoming environment to program on Linux and I'm having a ton of fun relearning Lisp with it. Having tried using SBCL as a "Unix-ing with Lisp", Guile was so much easier. It Just Worked the way I expected when touching the OS, compared to CL's crazy filepaths and time epoch.
I've also greatly enjoyed reading the compiler/VM backstory on http://wingolog.org/ . It occurs to me that if you have an efficient Scheme VM, you could use it as a target for a lot of other languages and get something of an 100% OSS .Net or Java polyglot ecosystem going. Parrot was the previous hope but it seems to have fallen into being a mostly academic exercise.
And then there's "GuileMacs", which seems to get closer to a reality with every push. Not being a native Lisper, I think Emacs could use a boost from having a faster VM and lexical scope.
Really there's just a lot to love about Guile. I'm excited about all the activity and attention it's getting.