October: Wellington only

November 2, 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

November 1, 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

October 31, 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

October 23, 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

October 23, 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.