Those who know me know I have a strong interest in cooking shows. I am a huge fan of Iron Chef and Alton Brown’s Good Eats (so much so that I actually own all three volumes of the Good Eats cookbooks!). Although I haven’t watched much in the way of cooking shows in recent years due to not having a permanent cable subscription, my zest for this content is as strong as ever. ...

• tv

My wife and I finally finished Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None”, the social commentary comedy about the challenges of coming of (older) age for a directionless aspiring actor and his friends rounding their thirties. I particularly enjoyed episodes two and ten. Episode two has Dev and his friend Brian discovering more about the culture of their immigrant families, which they took for granted and never really learned about growing up. Episode ten, the season finale, explores Dev’s struggles with commitment and aspirations for his own life. ...

• tv

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks now. There is a story told among programming language enthusiasts that programming as an art only “clicks” once a programmer understands the Lisp programming language. I finally feel like I’ve reached that point. Although I don’t think I’m an amazing programmer, I finally feel like I understand the difference between languages (like Python and Lisp), and why Lisp is often considered so much more flexible and powerful (at least in theory) than a language like Python or C. ...

• clojure
• programming

I suppose I’ve been playing freemium video games for a few years now. (For those who haven’t heard of the “freemium” business model, it’s the strategy of selling a good or service which is free to access but costs money for premium features. Freemium software, especially video games, are popular because the barrier to entry is made as low as possible to hook people. I highly recommend the South Park episode on the subject, “Freemium Isn’t Free”. ...

• video-games
• economics

Peter Naur, famous in the programming world for his contributions to ALGOL and the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) notation for expressing grammars, passed away last week. (For those who are not in the programming world, ALGOL’s grammatical syntax inspired most of today’s most popular programming languages, like C, C++, Java, and Python). As a very young millennial programmer, I’d of course heard Naur’s name from the BNF notation, but didn’t really get to appreciate just how prescient his work was at the time. ...

• programming
• software-engineering
• cooking