A few months ago, some coworkers sent around a Ruby challenge. It appears simple, but we can sometimes learn a lot from simple problems. Write a Ruby program that determines the smallest three digit number such that when said number is divided by the sum of its digits the answer is 20. In case that’s not clear, [...]

There is a function I need. I know how to write it, but I don’t know if it has a standard name (like map, fold, etc.). It takes one argument — a list of something — and returns a list of 2-tuples of equal length. Each tuple contains one item from the list and the [...]

That’s the title of my presentation at Dog Food Conference 2014, 29-30 September, in Columbus, Ohio. If you found my post on "Test-Only Development" with the Z3 Theorem Prover was interesting, then you’ll love this. What if simply writing "unit tests" was enough to produce a program which makes them pass? What if your compiler could [...]

That’s the title of the presentation I’ll be giving at CloudDevelop 2014, on October 17th, in Columbus, Ohio. If you read my blog at all then you’re probably interested in where software development will be headed five years in the future. Two things I recommend that you study are proving systems and homomorphic encryption. I’ve written [...]

In this post I’ll introduce a style of programming which may be totally unfamiliar and perhaps a bit magical to many readers. What if you could write a unit test for a problem and have your compiler automatically return a correct implementation? Call it "test only" instead of "test first." I’m going to translate the [...]