whoami

All known evidence says that I am a sentient HGI (Human General Intelligence), not an artificial general one. Eval/Apply animates me merely as a concept, not as source code ¹. I assure you, pinky promise.

I do this professionally. And this is what I am up to now.
I blog here about software, complexity, systems, organisations etc.
I enjoy making software things and nerding out about said things ².
Learn generously directs ³ what I teach, speak, organise, code.

Standing Invitation ⁴

Email me just because (not just for work). Whatever feeds your curiosity; silly, fun, nerdy, serious ⁵.

Why?

Do unto me what I have done unto others. I habitually cold-email anyone who moves me in some way (joy, insight, utility, mind shift…). I also love to receive such email!
There is too little unsolicited positive feedback in much of most of our lives. At some point in the fuzzy past, I decided enough was enough. At least someone somewhere ought to feel good sometime for no reason whatsoever. Since that realisation, I have cold-emailed people willy-nilly. See also: Saying Thank You, and Days Are Easily Made.
It's always been a delight; no regrets. You should try it too!

So, let serendipity reign; write away!

A statutory content warning, though… A friend told me I can get along with a rock. AC/DC started playing in my head. So, dear human, that is whom you are about to email ⁶.

Oh, and I also post a newsletter sometimes. Feel free to take it!

eval/apply is wicked cool… Circa 1960, A.I. pioneer John McCarthy gave us eval and apply, two mutually recursive LISP functions that encode the kernel of all of programming. Like yin/yang ☯, they contain each other. And they evoke other nonduals to live by; diffuse/focus, abstract/reify, design/develop.

Stuart Feldman: If nothing else, Lisp was carefully defined in terms of Lisp.

Alan Kay: Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

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For example, Bad Matrix makes me unreasonably happy, and various people seem to really like these posts.
- Cold restart whole system after total outage
- n ways to FizzBuzz in Clojure
- Systems, Scale, Value
- How To Not Die By A Thousand Cuts. Or, How To Think About Software Quality.
- A Clojure View of "Mars Rover"
- Why and How I use "Org Mode" for my writing and more
- A series of posts on Shell ain't a bad place to FP
- A series of posts on Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way
And many more topics!↩︎
Learn generously is one of the self-directives at my favourite programmers' community, the Recurse Center. One stands on the shoulders of giants. One has received much generosity. One benefits greatly from contributions to the public commons. One tries to give back in one's meager ways.↩︎
Copying the "standing invitation" idea promoted by Messrs Derek Sivers and Patrick McKenzie.↩︎
Clojure and FP nerds, double-write me, you rare birds. Let us hail Lambda, The Ultimate together.

For the love of State is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from Lambda the Ultimate, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

— self.

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For those about to rock, I salute you. For it's a long way to the top, if you wanna rock 'n roll.

They're all basically the same song, which is why I dig them all. :D↩︎

whoami

Standing Invitation 4

Standing Invitation ⁴