A few videos: a new series I’m making, plus a couple of talks from my Ruby days, both given at Ruby Manor in London.
Magical Machine #1: Mandelbrot
The first in a series taking a closer look at the beautiful machines hiding in mathematics — starting with the Mandelbrot set.
A Random Walk
Ruby Manor 3, October 2011
A wander through randomness: what it is, why it’s hard to reason about, and the surprising places it turns up in software. Along the way it visits entropy, Monte Carlo methods, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, bloom filters, mutation testing, Netflix’s Chaos Monkey, ERNIE the premium bond computer, and the perils of generating random numbers with a method chosen at random. The slides were shuffled into a random order before the talk, naturally.
Watch the video · Slides (PDF)
Short Order Ruby
Ruby Manor 2: Manor Harder, 2009
A talk about Ruby as a well-behaved citizen of the Unix command line. It covers pipelines and pipemills, the magic of ARGF and the -n and -i flags, taming $stdout.sync, and driving other programs with backticks, IO.popen and Open3 — ending with a script that lets a chat room play interactive fiction together through a Frotz process. Short, sharp scripts cooked to order.