λ
Hi, I'm Russell, a writer and programmer in the Bay Area. I've been writing essays, newsletters, and evergreen notes on this little site for six years (!) now, totaling more than a quarter million words. Originally inspired by Robin Sloan's Year of the Meteor newsletter, you'll find all kinds of topics within, including among others:
- The trials and travails of writing (and rewriting, and rewriting...) a novel(s).
- Musings on cultural evolution, memory, cognition, consciousness, and neurodiversity.
- Technical content of interest to professional software engineers and particularly engaged amateurs.
- Literary criticism, which is to say, music, book, and film recommendations.
Samplers
Here's a sampler of some of the content you can expect as you delve deeper into the forest of words. These aren't my favorite posts or even the most read, but they give a good idea of the typical content.
Pattern Language
A guide to some of the concepts I return to a lot.
Folk Mental Models
Exploring how folk mental models develop.
Farmers & Foragers
Two kinds of people that often don't like each other very much.
Calendrical and Cartographic Thinking
Comparing how we think when looking at calendars and maps.
How to Read a Lot
My tips on reading a lot.
A Cancer on Liberalism
On two ideologies of the 20th century
The Bridge
Borgesian short fiction about a creepy bridge.
28 Pieces of Advice for 28
Doling out advice for my 28th birthday.
Cinema as the cathedral of modernity
Are films the modern equivalent of medieval cathedrals?
Modernism as Global Monoculture
Is modernity a single cultural 'package'?
Small Things To Make Life Better
Cheap but lovely gifts to give at a surprise white elephant party.
A REPL for Writing
As a writer, should I deliberately practice time-to-feedback?
Writing Compiler
My preferred way of thinking about large language models.
Software Engineers and the Illusion of Explanatory Depth
Are software engineers less vulnerable to this bias?
How many programmers does it take to fix a lightbulb?
Fermi estimation in programming interviews as discipline error.
Communities of Practice
Why I find it hard to intentionally practice photography.
New Absurdism
In which I try to give a name to a new genre I see emerging.
My Favorite Bookstore Is A Library
Many libraries are willing to buy books for you!
In Which I Wax Nostalgic for My Lost Youth
A navel-gazing quarter-life crisis post.
CV
Professionally, I am a software engineer (that was probably obvious from saying I'm a programmer in the Bay Area, eh?). I am shortly joining Vanta and was formerly a product engineer at Descript and Asana. As you probably assumed, my opinions here are my own and don't reflect the views of my current, future, or former employers.
I have a bachelor's degree in computer science & mathematics from the University of British Columbia. I live in San Francisco with my wife Sherry and our small canine companion Rooibos.
Colophon
This site is built with Astro. The body text is Charter (falling back on the Transitional fonts from Modern Font Stacks). Monospace text is Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono. The color palette is primarily from Matthew Howell's Reasonable Colors. The site is served via Cloudflare Workers. You can see the full source on Github.
I heavily use the Greek lambda as a personal symbol because I played too much Half-Life 2 as a child and because I had a brief, torrid love affair with the lambda calculus as a university student.
Copyright
Unless otherwise specified, all content on this site is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
After an initial flurry of opening hellos, he and Russell — the wonderful girl's brother's name was Russell, a name which to Arthur's mind always suggested burly men with blond mustaches and blow-dried hair who would at the slightest provocation start wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirt fronts and would then have to be forcibly restrained from commentating on billiards matches — had quickly discovered they didn't like each other at all.