Distillations is a personal and technical blog. Outside this corner, I’m RIFF’s co-founder and previously worked on engineering teams at Peloton, Tumblr, Imgur, Twitter, and Microsoft.
First time here? Entries with an asterisk are some of my favorites.
Engineering and mathematics
Personal
Letters to J
- 001 — Upon further reflection
- 003 — September 26th*
- 005 — Bookmarks
- 007 — Revisiting earned fatigue
- 009 — Listen to the gardeners
- 011 — Phrontisteries*
- 013 — A surefire capture the flag strategy
- 015 — A Cascade Tetris friendship
- 017 — Setting boundaries and the Yoneda Lemma
- 019 — Misty*
- 021 — Three-person group chats
- 023 — Face mask by face mask
- 025 — Punch-carded days*
Short form
Technical diary
- Mapping with parsers
- combineLatest’ing an empty collection
- From parsing operators to methods
- Empty reducers and the monoidal unit
- Conditional gestures in SwiftUI
- Swimming out past intuition
- Why folks use <> for same-type composition
- Pausing with Binding’s dynamic member subscript
- Stress testing variadic zip
- Why “sink?”
- Profunctors generalize relations
- All metric spaces are Lawvere metric spaces
- Easing AnyCancellable storage
- Weak assignment in Combine
- There’s sliced bread, and then Result.publisher
- Postfix type erasure
- Parity and arity
- Contrasting isomorphisms, equivalencies, and adjunctions
- Why optics?
- TIL about Publishers.MergeMany.init
- Naturality condition
- Why applicatives are monoidal
- Type erasure and forgetful functors
- Co-, contra-, and invariance
- What makes natural transformations, natural?
- “Oh, the morphisms you’ll see!”
- Getting an intuition around why we can call contramap a pullback
- (un)zurry
- ObservableType.do or .subscribe (Publisher.handleEvents or .sink)?