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“So, erm… Perhaps you could tell me a bit about your background?” He hasn’t read your resume. No man can. “In the winter,” you begin, “above the ice-locked fjørds, lies a creek, ash-white with the ghosts of glaciers–”

• Reversing the Technical Interview
• Hexing the Technical Interview
• Typing the Technical Interview
• Rewriting the Technical Interview
• Unifying the Technical Interview

Maybe the most entertaining writing relating to CS out there. You don't need to read in order.

I have a natural revulsion to any operating system that shows so little planning as to have to named all of its commands after digestive noises (awk, grep, fsck, nroff).

A classic. An especially fun read having grown up knowing UNIX as "the good OS".

Have you ever felt that integer literals like "4" don't convey the true size of the value they denote? If so, use an analog integer literal instead…

One of my go-to examples for showing people what ridiculousness is possible in C++.

"Hey ChatGPT. Can you implement a large language model in SQL?" "No, SQL is not suitable for implementing large language models…"

Who said SQL wasn't a real language?

Wounding a 'pid monster' corresponds to executing a 'renice +5' on the associated process. Killing a 'pid monster' sends a 'kill -9' to the associated process.

I got this working once and had to watch the Xorg process friendly fire my Xinit process. A losing battle.

I wanted to make a programming language that resembled magical circles.

Super pretty demo of programs-as-magic-circles. Makes me wonder what the artsier side of visual programming could be.

The two prereqs of this course are CLY150 (Thermal Clairvoyance) and CSC160 (Advanced Introduction to Computer Science).

"Unfiction" from a world where we can predict the future.

At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats…

A quality rant on the PSD file format.

I've been programming in C for a while now, but some things already feel simpler in Python…[t]he one thing that'll take some getting used to is that you have to end statements with commas, not semicolons.

My personal favorite joke post of all time. I highly recommend digging into the code to understand what exactly is happening! I've archived the code here just in case it ever goes down.

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther." I choked on my latte. "Come again?"

A famous classic. A satisfying example of a bug that sounds impossible!

What transpired in the next few minutes was that /dev, /etc and /lib had also gone in their entirety; fortunately Neil had interrupted rm while it was somewhere down below /news, and /tmp, /usr and /users were all untouched.

Another famous classic. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you accidentally ran rm -rf /?

Sitrep: we have 8 shard files that we apparently cannot use to restore the master key and zero master key backups.

A lesser known tale, but just as good!

If you’ve followed along so far, the engine should fire right up. Don’t be fooled—it will die in eight seconds when the priming fuel runs out.

Hilariously written piece on the perils of using an old car.

[This program] is intended to sustain a performance of 64 bytes of FizzBuzz per 4 clock cycles…[t]his is faster than a number of standard functions. In particular, it's faster than memcpy…

I've never read through the code in full, but this is a classic stackexchange thread.

I maintain that this digit has a poor personality. It is clumsy and forever getting in the way. It is lazy at every opportunity, and it is at all times arrogant.

A journal article about why the index finger is bloat, actually. I don't think I particularly buy this claim, but it's certainly a funny one.

FizzBuzz is a simple game for children, and therefore a really hard nut to crack for programmers and computer scientists.

FizzBuzz is kind of a weird program if you think about it.

Some blog posts about projects that I think are fun.

• 50 Hours to Draw Some Lines
• Concrete Laptop Stand
• An IRC client in your motherboard
• Edsger: A ReMarkable REPL
• 1:25 scale Cray C90 Wristwatch