David Beazley

Educator and musician living in Evanston, Illinois. I wrote some Python books, but you'll probably find me yapping on about bikes, trombones, dogs, and other random stuff here. Currently pursuing a MAT in Secondary Education with the hope of becoming a high school math teacher.

Website: https://dabeaz.com
Github: https://github.com/dabeaz

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nprofile1qqsylplalr7j6pqzl5y09y9l5n827zhpann4et0w2ky9t6mhvddd49cpqqy6vkt7

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Last Notes

2026-07-03 01:40:49 UTC

Getting ready to return back across the prairie again. Debating if I should rocket along I-80 or take a detour to go see Carhenge.

2026-06-30 07:34:15 UTC

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Meanwhile, my thoughts wander to pondering if this guy's large shaggy ball will leave a more enduring human legacy than all of software.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/837/880/016/761/304/original/0d10bd42e2e6b1d3.png

2026-06-30 01:57:18 UTC

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I wonder if there's ever been an Autocorrectionville?
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/836/571/044/204/178/original/93dc296abf32c00e.png

2026-06-29 11:11:48 UTC

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Okay, let's get the hell outta Dodge.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/833/089/101/277/397/original/567dd791cc1188c9.png

2026-06-29 02:36:45 UTC

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I don't really know if highway 20 counts as a "back road", but it's definitely a lot more chill than I-80. Overnighting in Fort Dodge--mainly so I can wake up and say "gotta get the hell out of Dodge."

2026-06-28 13:33:42 UTC

Find myself having to make an unplanned road trip. Could fly. Don't want to. Could take the interstate. Nah. Could use a map. Nope. Think I'm just going to leave the house and drive backroads across the prairie until I get there some 1000 miles later. Sort of homing pigeon style.

2026-06-26 14:41:19 UTC

One advantage I've realized as an older student is having a ton of life-experience. So, when asked to write an essay on <literally any topic>, I can just start telling some tangential story about that one time I was out <doing something seemingly unrelated> and then somehow tie it to whatever is actually supposed to be discussed.
Later, when I get the grade back, the professor just writes "I wish I could have a coffee with you!" Ha!
Suck it boring-ass LLMs...

2026-06-25 15:58:34 UTC

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Hot take: 99% of the coders with books like Steven's Unix Network Programming on their shelves had them there for the same reason why doctors and lawyers have framed copies of their college diplomas hanging on the wall.

2026-06-25 15:46:53 UTC

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjjydz40rNI

2026-06-25 15:44:51 UTC

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Some books are hard because they're so hard core. For example, there's no practical reason for me to keep the Steven's Unix Network Programming Book, nor can I see myself coding up a hobby project where I'm writing socket code in C for fun, yet I can't bring myself to toss it. Maybe it's because of that scene in Wayne's World or something.

2026-06-25 15:41:16 UTC

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Meanwhile, number of math books I've tossed for being obsolete: 0.

2026-06-25 15:39:50 UTC

My ruthless purge of programming books continues. Changing the criteria from "might I need to read this someday?" to "might I read this for fun?" definitely cuts things down a lot.
I'm not quite at the level of "would my kids want to inherit this?" level of filtering, but if I squint, I can see that from here.

2026-06-21 14:07:05 UTC

Wondering if I should pull out the Superboard to see if it still works. Maybe. I still think this was one of my most fun programming projects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB2t6xG2RzE

2026-06-20 13:44:29 UTC

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A total ride time of 3:36, stopped for 13 minutes. I wouldn't describe it as especially fast, but still a respectable pace for an aging geek.

2026-06-20 12:25:06 UTC

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Well, managed to go out for a respectable 54.5 mile ride starting at 3:38am. It's not as much recovery as I wanted, but it will have to do for now. It's a beautiful day for riding though.

2026-06-19 14:45:28 UTC

Debating if I should try for a long (>50mi) bike ride tomorrow as a recovery ride for the last 10 weeks of grad school. Maybe.

2026-06-14 09:16:29 UTC

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This-/especially the "for fun" part. The last time I released something, I was mostly hoping to have some dialogue around it. "Here's this neat thing, let's play with it, see what happens. Have some fun." Instead, I get a bunch of people complaining about code style things (nothing of substance). Then some other shithead reimplements the whole project from scratch, commits a governance model as the first file, and that was the end of that (for me).

2026-05-30 11:59:34 UTC

Think I might have just reported the 100,000th Flock camera on https://deflock.org. Website says 99,997 cameras reported and I just found three more on my morning bike ride.

2026-05-27 11:41:37 UTC

Has anyone done a detailed study of how these massive data centers actually spend their CPU cycles? I've always just assumed that the whole spectacle was mostly a front for crypto nonsense.

2026-05-20 11:29:17 UTC

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This feels less like a technological transition and more like an assault on every aspect of humanity that matters to me.

2026-05-20 09:32:30 UTC

I've always tried to be ethically minded in my teaching and my business--and I've got a lot of ethical issues with AI. I just can't pivot to that even if AI has what coders crave. Sorry. No.
Sadly, this seems to mean there's no more business of teaching. Sigh.

2026-05-11 16:47:12 UTC

Sure, you don't have to use cocaine, but all of your students are using cocaine. They'd probably be more engaged if you were a bit more culturally sensitive and also used cocaine.

2026-05-08 12:59:29 UTC

Back in 2009, I remember showing up briefly at PyCon Chicago with a kid in a stroller. Today, that kid just left the house for his last day of high school. Life comes at you fast.

2026-05-07 13:32:40 UTC

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I'm not sure I have enough of a baseline to judge one way or the other except to say that I'm not sure that math education has ever been all that "great" for quite a long time in the US.
That said, I am extremely pessimistic about the use of "tech" in teaching math based on some of the things I saw. I was somewhat encouraged by the number of classes that used tech somewhat minimally though.

2026-05-07 11:29:05 UTC

The year is 2026. I just finished observing a day in the life of 35 high school math classes taught by 34 different math teachers across 7 different high schools. Ask me anything.

2026-04-09 11:20:22 UTC

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And I swear I'm seriously gonna punch the next person who says "but Bill Gates didn't graduate from college." Not here on friendly Mastodon mind you, but this seems to come up a lot in weird contexts. "Yeah, I got some thoughts about that, but you need to step a little closer to hear them."

2026-04-09 10:50:27 UTC

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And the world being on fire.

2026-04-09 10:47:05 UTC

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I am seriously depressed about this whole situation. And don't even get me started about the cost of college. Or the current employment prospects for entry level people on the other side of it.

2026-04-09 10:39:58 UTC

Must say, it's a hell of a time to be the parent of a moody student making a college decision when I've got a whole lot of thoughts about what AI has done to education. Not to mention all of my other thoughts about what Trump has done to research. And the nature of academia that was already around before any of this recent stuff. Kid, can you please just fucking pick the friendly small liberal arts school already?!?

2026-03-20 11:50:43 UTC

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It could be its own code review... "the code looks pretty buffaloed to me. Have fun with that."

2026-03-20 11:47:50 UTC

Idle thought: "buffalo" would be a good name for a coding agent. Then you could say things like "buffaloed buffalo", "buffalo buffaloed", "buffaloing buffulo", "unbuffaloed buffalo", "buffaloed buffalo buffaloed", "buffalo rebuffaloed", "buffalo buffaloes buffalo", and so on.
When fed back into buffalo's training, maybe all this writing would eventually drive buffalo into the singularity or some kind of other BS.

2026-03-19 17:05:36 UTC

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As a resident of the 9th district, it was pretty interesting to watch her campaign. She always struck me as authentic. I got a bit of a behind-the-scenes view of how she handled herself with 4th of July parades as well (I was in a group that marched just behind her and her entourage in one parade actually).
I'm just not sure she was able to fully cut through the chaos of that campaign--media exposure seemed thin to me near the end.

2026-03-14 17:55:49 UTC

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Thanks everyone for the kind words! This is by no means guaranteed--I have to take about 24 semester hours of classes, complete "field work" in HS classrooms, and eventually go through 10 weeks of student teaching. Plus there's the challenge of finding a job as a late career switcher. I like my odds (and math is a decently solid place to be as far as teacher demand), but I definitely don't think it's going to be easy.
At the very least, it's unlikely to be boring ;-).

2026-03-14 14:34:53 UTC

It just occurred to me that Pi-day might be the most appropriate day to make this kind of announcement about my future plans. https://dabeaz.com/next.html

2026-03-12 03:05:23 UTC

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Nah, I was just portending some future Python syntax involving triple-star--the behavior of which is to be determined. A pre-PEP maybe.

2026-03-11 21:11:09 UTC

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Have you considered using `** = ***`?

2026-03-08 22:24:47 UTC

The fact that there's so many tech people against daylight savings time tells me that it's probably a pretty good idea actually.

2026-03-06 12:20:54 UTC

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Neat! Kid was admitted to UMN and Macalester so we're checking things out. I have my thoughts on such things, but I'm not the one going.

2026-03-06 10:37:09 UTC

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So, with the purpose of this trip being a visit to nice quiet liberal arts college, we somehow found ourselves here last night. Uh.....
We had a great time. The key to a really good road trip, I think, is to impulsely do weird stuff that's outside your norm. Like that time I visited the Lawrence Welk childhood home and Graceland on the same road trip.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/181/757/318/618/841/original/575dc6faebaadd34.png

2026-03-05 18:29:32 UTC

Johnny Cash really is the perfect soundtrack for a college visit road trip with kid.

2026-03-04 14:17:56 UTC

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Rust is very different and it took me quite a lot of time to wrap my brain around what was happening. However, there is an overall consistency of vision about it that pays off I think.

2026-03-04 14:11:54 UTC

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I don't mind dynamic typing and I don't mind static typing, but gradual typing is just not a very enjoyable experience for me.
With regards to flexibility, I have found Rust to be pretty enjoyable--and there's a lot of things you can do if you get into things like macros.

2026-03-04 13:50:34 UTC

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I guess it depends on who you talk to. I think gradual typing is, in general, kind of a circus.

2026-03-04 13:24:32 UTC

"It fits your brain". https://peps.python.org/pep-0827/

2026-03-02 11:58:02 UTC

Wonder if I should install docker.

2026-03-02 02:15:12 UTC

In trying to make programming predictable, computer scientists have mostly succeeded in making programmers predictable.

2026-02-27 15:51:16 UTC

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I've been thinking about getting a T-shirt that says "Those who can't Claude" on it. If asked, I'd just complain about it missing the comma.

2026-02-25 15:48:52 UTC

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Because I'm cynical and think regulation is going to follow the money. They will literally regulate the worst possible outcome.

2026-02-25 15:37:05 UTC

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The likely outcome of any regulation is that software engineers will be forced to prove that they used AI.

2026-02-10 12:32:10 UTC

Age verification challenge: I know how to print things.

2026-02-08 14:18:08 UTC

What if there never was any craft?

2026-02-05 11:54:42 UTC

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Well, there is the whole extra super-fun bonus of aging parents thrown in here too ;-).

2026-02-05 11:51:51 UTC

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This babbling inspired by some recent conversation around "well, couldn't you keep the business going for awhile?" It's not entirely clear that there *is* anything to keep going.

2026-02-05 11:42:23 UTC

I find myself at a crossroads with respect to my business. I've always thought of myself as a kind of "academic", but I've long had a lot of misgivings about the whole system of academia as currently practiced. So, I'm fine with being out of the University.
I've been able to happily occupy a strange niche of independent teaching, but the recent headwinds have been undeniably fierce and I don't really think I'd enjoy a pivot to "prompting." So.... anyways, I'm babbling.

2026-02-03 01:24:00 UTC

Well, after 14 years, my Write a Compiler course is having its final curtain call February 16-20. You can still get in on the action though http://dabeaz.com/compiler.html.
Honestly, it's hard for me to believe that taking a class like this out of a university setting would even work for as long as it did. I definitely had a blast teaching it! But, alas, all good things eventually come to an end. Time to rotate the crops.

2026-01-21 14:58:27 UTC

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The problem is that I'm pretty niche and I also have a moral compass. I generally don't advertise at all. Very occasionally, I've made use of things like EthicalAds.

2026-01-21 14:39:20 UTC

I know about the collapse of traffic to sites like Stack Overflow, but is that also being seen on sites like ReadTheDocs?
This question partly motivated by a discussion I was having with someone about "where would one actually advertise?" in relation to the drop in my own business.

2026-01-15 13:36:51 UTC

The thing is, there's a big difference between code written by someone who doesn't know what they're doing versus code written by someone who doesn't care about what they're doing.

2026-01-05 12:31:48 UTC

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I've mostly just been quieting unfollowing people.

2026-01-05 11:57:38 UTC

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It occurs to me that ed would be a really great candidate for the Raft "application." That is, implement the Raft algorithm so that you can make a fault-tolerant replicated version of ed.

2026-01-05 11:51:08 UTC

Getting ready for this week's Raft course. I'll probably use emacs for this, but at any moment, I'll know that I could confidently switch to ed if I wanted to.

2026-01-03 01:33:46 UTC

Feeling completely brain-shattered by my whole epic Rust-ed coding adventure. What even was that? I have no idea. Still processing it.
Even more crazy is that I have the whole affair recorded end-to-end. Both on video and as a complete terminal history. All of the coding, debugging, testing, and refactoring is there. I'm figuring out what to do with that.
For now though.... sleepy time.

2025-12-31 12:21:14 UTC

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Like biking in the snow at 4:30am, when you code with ed, you know you'll code alone in a blissful state of flow.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/814/142/198/487/950/original/83f9c3e03b6be6ce.png

2025-12-31 10:34:19 UTC

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Too wired to sleep, but now a dilemma. Do I code more on the garbage collector or do I go out biking in the snow? Hmmm. Maybe both!

2025-12-30 23:59:57 UTC

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Well, I definitely coded up some garbage after that. Think that ends the day for now. Good progress overall.

2025-12-30 20:03:28 UTC

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Garbage collection is always better after a nap.

2025-12-30 18:15:29 UTC

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Well, Mabel's intuition on the HashMap proved insightful. I now seems to have closures working and Chapter 25 complete.
Oh, chapter 26 coming up. Garbage collection. How hard could that be?
(In theory, if I've been working my abstractions correctly, this will not be THAT hard. Famous last words).

2025-12-30 17:01:53 UTC

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Oh, AND NULL POINTERS.
Took a bit of a short break to rub Mabel's belly. She then whispered something that sounded sort of like "HashMap". So...

2025-12-30 16:51:02 UTC

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OKAY THEN. LET'S HAVE EVEN MORE MUTABLE LINKED LISTS!
The fact that this chapter ends with a little part titled "Challenges" is not lost on me...

2025-12-30 12:11:18 UTC

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Did I mention that there's not even any syntax highlighting?

2025-12-30 10:23:52 UTC

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As I get up for day 7....
Crafting Interpreters: "Here's this pointer to this thing that points at this other thing. But it doesn't own that. But don't worry, we'll fix that dangling pointer later. Oh, and note that it's kind of wild how we're mutating the thing in the middle of these other things inside this linked thing. LOL!"
Rust: <Icy Stare>
Ed: "I'm just sitting here laughing while I watch you try to edit/debug the thing."
Me: "Here, hold my beer."

2025-12-29 23:15:32 UTC

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Is there a hidden level beyond unsafe?

2025-12-29 23:10:35 UTC

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Yep, ended up undoing all of that. However, now really into some deep quicksand working on the implementation of closures (chapter 25). Pointers, linked lists, recursion, and mutability everywhere in all directions. This is some very happy Rust coding.

2025-12-29 18:09:57 UTC

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The fact that I just put two lifetime specifiers on a single structure and managed to get everything to compile and run again is a sure sign it might be time to take another break. I feel this part might be ending badly in the not too distant future... (and I will be undoing aforementioned lifetimes).

2025-12-29 15:39:32 UTC

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Made it to the end of chapter 24. An initial benchmark has me running 75% slower than Python 3.13 on a fibonacci example. Honestly not bad consider the primary focus up to now has been on getting it work at all.

2025-12-29 13:38:24 UTC

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As I go into day 6 of my big coding project comprising of a single `ed` session, the activity monitor tells me that `ed` has now used a cumulative total of 1.46s of CPU time.

2025-12-29 12:04:51 UTC

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Woke at 4am with a fix in mind so I coded that. It worked. Now, maybe an exercise break before getting native functions implemented.

2025-12-29 02:11:12 UTC

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Welp, hit a wall on the borrow checker with something. Time for sleep I think.

2025-12-29 00:29:54 UTC

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Well, this chapter 24 on functions is definitely "a beast" as self-described in the opening sentence. I've made it to the part of trying to call functions (not yet working). Debating whether to try and power through after dinner or take a break until tomorrow.
Aside: The "flow state" of coding in ed is far more intense than I would have anticipated. Time disappears.

2025-12-28 22:05:31 UTC

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Ah yes. All manner of "hard" stuff (i.e., ownership issues) can be solved with macros. As foretold.

2025-12-28 18:16:42 UTC

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Maybe a bit of reading and some basic preliminaries first. Then a nap. Then work on the hard stuff. That sounds like a plan.

2025-12-28 17:41:22 UTC

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Well, I've made it through Chapter 23 on control flow and have loops working. Functions await. I suspect things are going to get bad now. Maybe a break for lunch first. And maybe a nap.
"What do you think Mabel?"

2025-12-28 14:24:21 UTC

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Meanwhile, I woke up in the middle of the night and mumbled something about "macros." Think I'll warm up with that--in ed (as previously noted).

2025-12-28 14:06:58 UTC

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Say what you will about dogs, but they'll gladly sit there and eagerly listen to your "ideas."

2025-12-28 14:05:33 UTC

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"So Mabel, hear me out for a moment. Because of memory safety--Rust. Because of memory prices--ed."
"Yeah, the standard editor."
"Anyways Mabel, day 5 of my project awaits."
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/797/562/496/447/648/original/a32c26a30cc80883.png

2025-12-27 23:51:52 UTC

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Day 4 is done and I'm up to about 20 hours of effort now. I've made it through local variables and am preparing to start Chapter 23 on control flow. I can't even express how much fun this project is with the crazy tooling--or lack of tooling as the case may be. The "standard editor" indeed.

2025-12-27 01:57:46 UTC

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Okay. Day 3 is done. Made it to the part just before global variables are defined. So, tomorrow will probably be dedicated to all things variables. About 15 hours into the project now.

2025-12-26 23:11:19 UTC

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So, I've decided to do my own GC. Have now reached the hash table chapter. Rust already has its own HashMap. I could use that as a shortcut. Or I could try to roll with the book and make my own.
At the moment, the Hash in the book seems somewhat disconnected from everything else. And I don't recall Lox as having HashMap as a kind of value that you could use in user code. Somewhat inclined to use Rust HashMap<> for this until I run into a reason not to.

2025-12-26 19:27:29 UTC

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The book sets up linked lists of heap-allocated objects (in C). Could be dicey trying to replicate that. Part of me says the whole problem could be avoided by slapping Rc<> on everything. But, that feels like cheating and not in the spirit of the overall affair. So.... hmmm.

2025-12-26 19:19:17 UTC

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Well, I seem to have made it as far as the great abyss--the point where Crafting Interpreters wants me to think about garbage collection. Coding in Rust, this is about to get "interesting." Maybe a short nap is in order first.

2025-12-26 13:32:02 UTC

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Well, up for day 3 of the crusted-ed project. Had a very sloppy bike ride in the rain to prepared for the day. Will now clean up and take care of the pooch before plowing onward into some code cleanup and further chapters.

2025-12-26 02:50:30 UTC

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Looks like the next few sections implement features that Rust already has (strings, hashmap, etc.). As instructive as that might be, I'm not going to reimplement all of that from scratch. At least I don't think so.

2025-12-26 02:44:05 UTC

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Finally made it through the first part of parsing (chapter 17). I'm about 8 hours into the whole project so far. But, done for today.

2025-12-25 17:26:18 UTC

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Welp, I've made it through scanning. Take a break in preparation for parsing. Still haven't left the original `ed` session I started yesterday.

2025-12-25 15:12:18 UTC

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Ok, let's continue onward with scanning! I already continue this once before in Rust, but the implementation in the second half of Crafting Interpreters takes a different approach with ownership. So, I'll try to stay in the spirit of that as I go.

2025-12-25 02:25:54 UTC

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Not sure how long this is going to take, but I'm guess it's definitely going to be a multi-day project (maybe even a week). Pondering: Should I upload the video in progress or wait until the whole thing is done?

2025-12-25 02:12:53 UTC

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About 3 hours in now. Made it to the start of scanning (section 16.1.2 in Crafting Interpreters). Wrote a Rust macro. Floundered about with some ed regex for a bit. However, making steady progress.

2025-12-24 21:54:21 UTC

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And, in the middle of working on this crazy Rust/ed coding thing, I get an AI-generated email from "Claude" thanking me for my Python work? WTF?!?!?

2025-12-24 21:50:09 UTC

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Also, mixing up ed regular expressions with Rust syntax is proving to be an interesting head trip.

2025-12-24 21:48:58 UTC

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Well, I'm about 90 minutes into this project so far. It's, uh, freaky. But, I'm making progress. Translating C to Rust is a whole different game than translating Java. I don't really feel like doing all of this low-level byte oriented free/malloc business. No, I'll just use Vec<> and other nice Rust stuff.