A common sentiment I see with folks interested in improving US homebuilding is that we should try and emulate Sweden. More specifically, that we should emulate Sweden’s large-scale adoption of prefabricated construction. Something like 85% of Swedish single family homes , along with 30-40% of multifamily buildings , are factory-built, produced in large, impressive-looking factories like Lindbäcks . Per this line of thinking, the main problem with US housing construction is that it’s stil...

I’ve been working on so many projects in 2025, I thought it was important for me to make a recap, if only just to clear my head. There are many, many, many things to go through and we don’t have a sponsor today, so I’m gonna start right away with facet! facet facet is a project that I started working on in March of this year — that’s right, it’s only been ten months, yet it feels like an eternity. ...

I'm glad to see the back of 2025, so let's focus on 2026. As I write this, it’s 18:49 on New Year’s Eve. I’m sat in the lounge, with the fire going, annoyed that our NYE plans have been ruined by me having the flu. I feels like an appropriately shitty end to a very shitty year. In 2025, I: Worked way too much Spent too much time away from home travelling for work Neglected those I love Helped my Mum, where possible, through recovering from a heart attack L...

I used to do a wordle cloud every year, until the original site went down and an online game pilfered the name. Which is a shame, because it’s such a cool concept! Here’s one for 2025, fed on 592 post titles from the year . Thanks to the Free Word Cloud Generator for making this so easy ^^/. SciArtSeptember featured heavily, owing to the fact I did an entire series on that back in September. Japan was also mentioned a lot after our trip earlier in the year. Lots of coffee and F...

I work at HPE on the Chapel Programming Language . Recently, another HPE person asked me: So, you work on the programming language. What’s next for you? This caught me off-guard because I hadn’t even conceived of moving on. I don’t want to move on, because I love the field of programming languages . In addition, I have come to think there is something in PL for everyone, from theorists to developers to laypeople. So, in that spirit, I am writing this list as a non-exhaust...

Some insights on who visited my blog in the last 12 months Some insights on who visited my blog in the last 12 months

In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. Plugging it into your IBM PC would make operations up to 100 times faster, a big boost for spreadsheets and other number-crunching applications. The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to compute trigonometric, logarithmic, and exponential functions. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in microcode. I'm part of a group that is reverse-enginee...

My work log tells me I’ve spent 54 hours since mid-November building this discrete event simulation , which works out to a little over an hour a day. I’ve learned a few things about SimPy and Polars along the way, and depending on what happens with my job search, I may run an online workshop in 2026 to walk people through it. For now, though, I need to put this aside and concentrate on completing a couple of small contracts and revising some of the fiction I finally “finished” . M...

Previously: 2024 , 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 A surprisingly persistent personality quirk I have is that I care a lot about the changeover of the new year. I quite like consuming yearly predictions, year-in-reviews, and so on, and use the calendar transition as a time for reflection. Work I’ve now been at Databricks for a little over 3.5 years, and it’s been quite a fun ride. In most ways, it’s exceeded my expectations from when I joined. I’ll hopefull...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/canceledbookdeal.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/canceledbookdeal.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/canceledbookdeal.html

Dear Team, As we near the end of the calendar year, I want to take a moment to reflect on everything we’ve accomplished together. 2025 was an extraordinary year for Shield AI, marked by record-breaking achievements with the Coast Guard, the launch of a new autonomous aircraft, and countless milestones in between. At every step, each of you played an essential role in making 2025 the year it was. I came into Shield AI in May with a background in building business in tech, not defense. Despi...

Linked lists are a data structure basic building block, with especially flexible allocation behavior. They’re not just a useful starting point, but sometimes a sound foundation for future growth. I’m going to start with the beginner stuff, then without disrupting the original linked list , enhance it with new capabilities. Linked list basics For the sake of an interesting example, I’m will demonstrate with the same concept as last time I talked about data structures : a collection ...

This year I ran three book club readings over email with 1,230 unique attendees. I ran 12 coffee club meetups in midtown Manhattan with 170 unique attendees. Angelo and I ran 6 NYC Systems meetups with 12 different speakers and 281 unique attendees. I took 3 visiting PhD students out for Banh Mi . I raised $6,915 for educational non-profits, offering chats in return. I got coffee, lunch, or took 30 minute calls with 55 people I'd never spoken to before in person or on video. (Most, bu...

0.0 Context Setting It’s been a minute. This is probably the third draft of an episode that I’ve tried to finish so maybe this one will stick. It has been hard to write, lately! It’s December 29 in Portland, Oregon and it is getting cold. Also many things have happened in the world and it feels like things that suck have outweighed the things that don’t suck. 0.1 Some Personal News Hey, did you know I do workshops and coaching now? I could explain what they do, but I’ll le...

Last month, I was thrilled to have the chance to give a colloquium talk, “Interpreters everywhere!”, at the Indiana University Computer Science Colloquium! This talk wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for my amazing students. In fact, some parts of it are directly ripped off from talks that my students Gan Shen and Jonathan Castello have given previously on our work: check out Gan’s talk on HasChor from ICFP 2023 and Jonathan’s talk on causal separation diagrams from OOPSLA 2024 . It...

Interpreters/Compilers The main theme for this year was text . I wanted to be very broad in applying this theme: interpreters/compilers, procedural generation, rendering, language models, text editors, search engines, and anything else related to text. Last year I bought and started reading munificent's excellent book Crafting Interpreters , but it wasn't until this year that I spent a lot of time on it. It creates a new language, Lox, and then teaches you how to write an interpreter and...

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 . It’s been a year filled with a lot of different trends. The year of "reasoning" The year of agents The year of coding agents and Claude Code The year of LLMs on the command-line The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance The year of $200/...

There are numbers every Python programmer should know . For example, how fast or slow is it to add an item to a list in Python? What about opening a file? Is that less than a millisecond? Is there something that makes that slower than you might have guessed? If you have a performance sensitive algorithm, which data structure should you use? How much memory does a floating point number use? What about a single character or the empty string? How fast is FastAPI compared to Django? I wanted to ta...

I distinctly remember waking up early, on January 1st, 2017, going downstairs with my laptop, making myself some coffee, and coding what ended up being the first iteration of this blog. I wanted to write weekly updates to hold myself accountable. I failed spectacularly. Reading that post from 9 years ago made me smile: 27-year-old me wanted to cut down on distractions and get the habit of waking up early back. Guess what? 36-year-old me also wants to cut down distractions and get the habit of w...

I am in the process of updating my résumé. Not because I’m looking for a job [1] , but because I like to feature my résumé on my website and the current published copy doesn’t reflect my pivot from engineering management to an individual contributor role two years ago . I feel a little bit weird about the misrepresentation, and would rather update the document than take it down. While working on some edits, I was reflecting on how things have been going, and decided to write this “wha...

GDB is great for stepping through machine code to figure out what is going on. It uses debug information under the hood to present you with a tidy backtrace and also determine how much machine code to print when you type disassemble . This debug information comes from your compiler. Clang, GCC, rustc, etc all produce debug data in a format called DWARF and then embed that debug information inside the binary (ELF, Mach-O, …) when you do -ggdb or equivalent. Unfortunately, this means ...

This is the last NULL BITMAP of the year. If you read these with any regularity, sincerely, thanks for spending time with me every week. Reflecting on the year, I have been a bit down about the future of programming culturally, with the advent of LLMs it feels like people are telling me that being interested in how things work and how best to think about things is a waste of time. That "no, no, we're automating the boring parts" refrain fills me with dread about which those people thought were...

Memory Safety Is … Dec 30, 2025 Memory safety is one of those elusive concepts like intelligence, consciousness, or porn , that resist attempts to be put to words. Thus, I am not going to attempt to define it. Instead, I want to poke holes in definitions of others. Note that the present post is 90% sophistry in the style of Zeno — I don’t think you need a water-tight definition to have a reasonable discussion, and no definition can save an unreasonable one. But thinking about ...