Hey! Welcome to my site. I'm Fred. Sometimes I write code, and I like to talk about that. Other times, I teach about science and electronics. Also, I write words.

Computers

How does curl really work, though—explaining what happens under the hood when you run curl http://github.com on a Unix-like glibc system.

Factor & algorithms

Factoring the Luhn algorithm
Implementing a simple algorithm in a concatenative language.

QR Codes in Factor
Fun experiments with encoding contact data as QR codes.

Sorting in Factor
Poking around the builtin facilities for sorting.

Solving Embarrassingly Simple Problems (in Factor)
Translating some Erlang problem-solving strategies to Factor.

Also, I implemented the optimized AES-128 algorithm in Factor as an exercise. I would not trust the cryptographic security of my implementation—it has not been audited for side-channel attacks, etc, as appropriate for production-grade cryptography. For serious crypto work, use Factor's libsodium binding instead.

Thinking & Health

• incremental doing—a brief essay on overthinking things

Miscellany

I like to collect quotes. There's a small screengrab hall of fame that makes me chuckle.