Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202204281133 Evaluation, storage, and representation as the basis of modern computing

Modern computation can be described as the creation and management of three fundamental aspects.

Evaluation — our ability to operate on data
Storage — our ability to transfer data across space or time
Representation — our ability to communicate data (e.g. visually or audibly)

All software systems — no matter how complex — can categorize their constituent pieces as one of these three actions.

An example:

In a simple, traditional 202204281140 Model, view, controller architecture, the model is responsible for storage, the controller is responsible for evaluation, and view is responsible for representation. This is obviously a simplification, but we could just get more specific and granular about which code is doing what and we'd see that the idea holds in the general case.