People (and myself) can rag on this website a lot but it really has changed the trajectory of my professional life. It’s where I: * first learned about CRDTs,

People (and myself) can rag on this website a lot but it really has changed the trajectory of my professional life. It’s where I: * first learned about CRDTs, kickstarting an interest in distributed systems * first learned about TLA+, kickstarting an interest in formal specification * first saw the book Quantum Computing Since Democritus recommended (in a post about Professor Sussman’s reading list), kickstarting an interest in quantum computing * first learned about the LEAN theorem prover, kickstarting an interest in machine-checked proofs of correctness for mathematical theorems * first learned about tree-sitter, leading me to write a tree-sitter grammar for TLA+ All of these (well, except quantum computing really - that remains a pleasant side-hobby although I did work in Microsoft’s quantum program for a bit) are now things I use in the contracts I work on as an independent software engineering consultant, and the open source work I do in between. TLA+ especially has had an enormous impact. Five good posts over the course of ten years is still a pretty good signal/noise ratio!