December: Christmas in NZ, 2.5 trips, a Great month
1 Jan 2021
There’s a lot more concluding to do in the year in review post that I’ll do next. Let’s focus on December. I’m very fortunate to have been able to see more of the South Island this month, including basically all of the highlights of Fiordland now. (Looking at the Dusky Track which is definitely not type 1 fun.) Also around Dunedin, which doesn’t have high mountains, but does have a few rocks to climb, coastal scenery, and birds.
SE Student Support
12 Dec 2020
I gave a presentation about the Software Engineering undergraduate program at Waterloo.
I got a question which I took offline about student support at Waterloo. I think it’s worthwhile to post this here. I am adding some comments from Derek Rayside, current SE Director. Response follows.
Thanks for your question about study skills and student support etc. That could be a whole other talk!
As came up in the talk, we’re privileged at Waterloo SE to be able to be highly selective with respect to admissions. But, as I mentioned, we still have students, especially in first year, who learn things about themselves that maybe they hadn’t anticipated learning. (“Oh actually I’m much more interested in Psychology than Software Engineering!”) As well as previously-undiscovered mental health issues.
November: 1.5 trips
3 Dec 2020
Making the most of my time in New Zealand, and visiting a new-to-me region, as well as re-visiting Fiordland and hiking some mountains. Left town twice this month: once for Auckland plus the ‘Far North’/Bay of Islands, and once for Fiordland, but that trip was half in December.
October: Wellington only
2 Nov 2020
For the first time since lockdown, we didn’t get out of town all month. On Friday I am going to Auckland and then the Bay of Islands for the week. It feels like I did a lot of work in October but I’m not quite sure what I have to show for it. Certainly a talk. Thought about ongoing projects and working towards a new project (or at least a funding opportunity). Did travel planning for Auckland.
Onward! Essay: Putting the Semantics into Semantic Versioning
1 Nov 2020
From personal experience, I can attest that maintaining compiler infrastructure that builds on top of LLVM is hard over the long term. You try to compile something from a year ago with newest LLVM and find that it no longer works. The upstream LLVM developers make breaking API changes and it is the responsibility of downstream clients to fix their code accordingly.
I can only imagine the joys of keeping up with the JavaScript frontend and npm ecosystems, having mostly avoided that fun. A few months ago, I did get hit with a breaking Hugo update.
In this essay, we make a broader argument: there are opportunities in analyzing changes to software components and either certifying compatibility or detecting breaking changes. Furthermore, many programming languages techniques (formal verification through testing and of course programming language design) can contribute to the important problem of reasoning about upgrades. We survey the role of contracts and discuss how to best determine the exposed API surface of a component.
Living without a phone
31 Oct 2020
I dropped my phone last Thursday and got it back from the shop yesterday (Wednesday). Some reflections on not having a phone for a week (in the city).
Advice for Waterloo SE/CS/CE students about grad school
23 Oct 2020
I wrote this in an email to a Waterloo Software Engineering student, but it’s worthwhile to put on the Internet more broadly.
Let’s take a step back and talk about graduate school vs undergrad. For a PhD essentially all of the action is in your thesis and very little is your courses. Of course you’re not signing up for a PhD at the moment but instead a Master’s, so it’s not quite the same.
Weird LaTeX error: File l3backend-pdfmode.def not found
23 Oct 2020
For the past few months, LaTeX had been completely broken on my computer. I’d been hoping it was something systemwide and that upgrading LaTeX would fix it. Nope. I’d tried mitigating using different engines. Turns out, xelatex produces different line breaks (!!) and lualatex was somehow incompatible with acmart 1.73 on my computer (metric data for lmroman10-regular not found). Computers are great.
Here’s the pdflatex error message:
! LaTeX Error: File `l3backend-pdfmode.def’ not found.
New-to-me bicycle
15 Oct 2020Back in January I had spotted a garage sale in Paraparaumu. There were two bicycles. I got up early at the airbnb and walked to the sale at the Kāpiti Collective early Saturday morning and saw that there was a $20 bicycle and a $200 bicycle. [… Some months later,] I bought a new bike in Plimmerton and rode it back home. While walking to the seller’s place I noticed that his neighbour had a bunch of bicycles and a motorcycle, so I figured (correctly) that he would have a bike pump. […]
New Zealand Restaurants
3 Oct 2020I consolidated the list of restaurants we liked in New Zealand from my monthly summaries so far. Considering how few days we spent in Christchurch there are a surprisingly large number of restaurants from there. In general we’ve been doing a lot of cooking at home.
Wellington
Upesh Kitchen: Our favourite Kelburn take-out place, Malaysian and South Indian
Harbourside Market: Sunday market with food trucks
Best Ugly Bagels: Montreal-style bagels
