Better Software Conference 2025

I had the great honour and pleasure of attending the first Better Software Conference.

I gave a talk entitled "Assuming as Much as Possible". The premise of which is that there is overlap between the things computers & humans find easy, and that there hasn't been enough effort in finding & framing low-level constructs as human-friendly interfaces.
The talk uses examples from the WhiteBox codebase to discuss concrete methods for reducing layers of indirection in terms of mapping relationships, memory accesses, function calls, and conceptual abstraction.

Talk

Articles

I made the decision to not try to be exhaustive with each topic in the talk in the hopes that this allowed for a more engaging throughline. Text is a better medium for more thorough treatment, so I will be be accompanying the talk with a series of posts that cover its topics in more depth.

• A Survey of Dynamic Array Structures
• Xar - a simple, stable, CPU-friendly, growable array structure (TODO)
• C Macro/Type Hackery for Generic Containers (Xar) (TODO)
• Bits are High-Level (TODO)
• Thinking about References and Mappings (TODO)
• Rectangular Dimensions vs Static Typing (TODO)
• Generalization vs Abstraction (TODO)
• Pipelining Dependencies (TODO)
• Byte-First Thinking > Type-First Thinking (TODO)
• Assuming as Much as Possible... But No More (TODO)

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