Computer Things: 2019-2020

Software is more than code: it is also the models, habits, tools, arguments, and assumptions that shape how people build it. In Computer Things: 2019-2020, Hillel Wayne gathers two years of newsletter essays that examine those ideas with a software engineer’s eye for both technical detail and the oddities of the industry.

This collection includes subscriber-only writing alongside public essays, bringing together explorations of formal methods, programming languages, software correctness, documentation, and the culture around computer work.

Think more clearly about software

Across the essays, Wayne considers how developers describe and reason about systems: from formally modeling database migrations and finding concurrency bugs with TLA+ to making illegal states unrepresentable, understanding fairness, and specifying system behavior. The emphasis is not only on techniques, but on the mental models and choices that make technical problems easier—or harder—to understand.

From programming languages to everyday tools

The collection also ranges through Python, static and dynamic typing, special-purpose languages, Vim, AutoHotKey, syntax highlighting, and documentation. Rather than treating tools as neutral accessories, these pieces ask how their design affects the way people think and work.

Technology, judgment, and the profession

Other essays look outward to software engineering’s wider practices: testing, examples, industry trends, defects, mathematical reasoning, and the limits of clean-code ideals. The result is a varied set of arguments and observations rather than a step-by-step textbook—well suited to readers who enjoy questioning familiar assumptions about software.

A collected record of two years of writing

The book gathers 99 newsletters from 2019 and 2020. Housekeeping material was removed; the essays remain largely as originally presented, including early drafts of some pieces. For programmers, software engineers, and technically curious readers, it offers a substantial archive of one practitioner’s evolving ideas about how software is made and understood.