Happy New Year 2016 around the World: Behind the scenes of my #FsAdvent project

Just like last year and the year before, I wanted to participate in the #FsAdvent event, where someone writes a blog post about something they did with F# during December. Thanks to Sergey Tihon for the organization of the English version and the Japanese F# community for coming up with the idea a few years ago!

As my blog post ended up on 31 December, I wanted to do something that would fit well with the theme of ending of 2015 and starting of the new year 2016 and so I decided to write a little interactive web site that tracks the "Happy New Year" tweets live across the globe. This is partly inspired by Happy New Year Tweets from Twitter in 2014, but rather than analyzing data in retrospect, you can watch 2016 come live!

Philosophy of science books every computer scientist should read

When I tell my fellow computer scientists or software developers that I'm interested in philosophy of science, they first look a bit confused, then we have a really interesting discussion about it and then they ask me for some interesting books they could read about it. Given that Christmas is just around the corner and some of the readers might still be looking for a good present to get, I thought that now is the perfect time to turn my answer into a blog post!

So, what is philosophy of science about? In summary, it is about trying to better understand science. I'll keep using the word science here, but I think engineering would work equally well. As someone who recently spent a couple of years doing a PhD on programming language theory, I find this extremely important for computer science (and programming). How can we make better programming languages if we do not know what better means? And what do we mean when we talk about very basic concepts like types or programming errors?

Reading about philosophy of science inspired me to write a couple of essays on some of the topics above including What can programming language research learn from the philosophy of science? and two essays that discuss the nature of types in programming languages and also the nature of errors and miscomputations. This blog post lists some of the interesting books that I've read and that influenced my thinking (not just) when writing the aforementioned essays.

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