I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this incredible moment in history. In trying to wrap my head around it, I’m turning to what I know best: programs, programming, and software-intensive systems. And their flaws. This is a mini-essay on how the line between software systems and social systems is completely blurred, and how […]

Learning how to write performant code is hard. Here are a few simple laws that I hope will convey the core of the matter. I’m calling them…

I’ve been relatively low key about something that I’m very excited about, so, after several months of planning, and a first, somewhat quiet, submission deadline, it’s time to release my enthusiasm. A group of us have started a new conference called <Programming>  associated with a new open-access journal called The Art, Science and Engineering of Programming. Here […]

As a computer scientist specializing in programming, the social consequences of software-for-business-efficiency are worrying me more and more. Here at home, we’ve been having a conversation about what post-capitalism would look like in the face of quasi-universal automation, in the best case scenario. It’s really hard to tie all the loose ends of such a vision. […]

This post comes from an email conversation going on related to programming languages vs. libraries. The story goes that these days, the major productivity gains come not from new languages but from the existence of libraries that already do almost everything for you. That is unquestionable. These days people don’t choose programming languages as much […]

After failing to find good papers about distributed systems testing for many months, yesterday I asked a question in Twitter: Twitter friends: what papers or frameworks do you recommend regarding distributed systems regression or integration testing techniques? — Crista Lopes (@cristalopes) January 22, 2016 This got many retweets and some interesting replies, so I’m going to summarize them […]

See my post at the IEEE Software Blog.

The recent scandal at UC Berkeley’s Astronomy department regarding a star Professor being accused of sexual harassment and consequently resigning from his position, has, once again, had me thinking about how institutions and organizations deal with sexual harassment. There are a few problems with how sexual harassment policies, and their enforcement, are handled, and I […]

I’ve been a Professor for almost 13 years. During these 13 years, I have seen investment in routine academic IT infrastructures decrease steadily, while at the same time being encouraged/pushed to use commercial infrastructures. Academic administrators seem to be mostly preoccupied with the 1% of academic work that requires high performance computing, large clusters and super high […]

Quote from an email I received from a prospective PhD student: I get the impression that if doing a PhD is really going to help push me forward on this, I’ll have to be working closely with people from that whole milieu surrounding the ’80s/’90s Common Lisp scene and the heyday of PARC. There seem to […]