Introduction Though the mystery man Don Syme, Father of F#, is generally heralded for various software based innovations and other computer related things, it transpires he has talents in other unrelated areas.  Specifically, Don is master cow herder (yes, as in moo-cows).  Whilst this might seem unlikely, I present to you a legendary but scarce video, with Don in action whilst attempting to get to work across the treachrous cow infested fields of Cambridge. Behold! (Watch the whole thing for a bonus cow a[...]

There is a page in the Hugo documentation that describes how to use MathJax to embed nicely-typeset mathematics in one’s Hugo-generated site. For my own site, I took this as a starting point and made a few improvements. Here’s how I do the math typesetting in this blog. Authoring I author my posts in Markdown, where the bulk of the content is plain text. When I want to include specially-typeset mathematical expressions, I use a custom shortcode to convert TeX-style equation definition into a snippet o[...]

This is a bug/curiosity in PowerShell that I stumbled upon a few years ago, but never wrote up. The behavior hasn’t changed significantly in the intervening verions, so now I’m finally getting around to a quick blog post. Here’s a chart detailing the runtime of 4 different PowerShell approaches to de-duplicate a collection - i.e. filter an input collection to just its unique elements. Code used for the benchmark can be found here. Same chart, with log scale so it’s a little easier to distinguish the [...]

As part of the small minority of devs at my company who primarily run Windows, I’m accustomed to working around occasional Unix-specific behaviors in our build and deployment systems. Cygwin makes most stuff just work, I can fix simple incompatibilities myself, and as a last resort I can always boot into OSX for a while if needed. One oddity that took me quite some time to diagnose, though, was Git’s strange behavior when dealing with files in our repo whose names contained a colon. What happens when [...]

I was asked to give a presentation at work about Akka.Net. Even though my audience is 100% C# loving, I will give a demonstration with F# code. I was already working on a project to rewrite “Three is a Crowd” to the Actor model in F#, and this presentation was a driver to finish this project. Let’s share my experiences with Akka.Net here.Choices and MotivationThere were two goals of rewriting the game to Akka.Net. First of all, I wanted to try out a few design patterns. Secondly, if you ru [...]