"The most common vowel in English"?

[hʉz̥ ɪ̞̠̃ŋgɫɪ̞̠ʃ]?

Popular factoids about the English language often leave me feeling contrarian, as a native speaker of a variety of English often not included in these broad, unqualified statements. "English has no second person plural"? What do yous mean? And the seemingly ever popular: "schwa is the …

Intro to Quantum Computing

I work at a trapped ion quantum computing company writing compiler and control software in Rust and Python. I've had to learn about quantum computing for my work, and I have found it hard to find introductory literature …

Designing a RISC-V CPU, Part 2: Successfully executing (some) instructions

The previous instalment of this series was "basically an explanation of what FPGAs are and a 'hello world' nMigen example."¹ In this post, I will be detailing the design of my CPU as it currently stands, and going over the various mistakes I made along the way. As with …

Designing a RISC-V CPU, Part 1: Learning hardware design as a software engineer

I have no experience in digital logic design. That is, I didn't until I recently decided that I would like to try designing my own CPU and running it on an FPGA! If you too are a software engineer with a vague interest in hardware design, I hope this series …

Why can't I pass std::vector<Child*> as std::vector<Parent*>?

Introduction

This is a short post reflecting on some pretty basic C++ that bothered me because I felt like I didn't fully understand it. I felt that the language should be able to do more, and wanted to understand why it could not.

Subtype polymorphism and templates

In C++, subtype …

Emulating an STM32F4 in QEMU to test ARM assembly

I recently published a blog post titled How to flash an LED about writing ARM assembly for an STM32. I was running my code on a 1bitsy development board, but I wanted anyone to be able to have a go at writing the assembly and testing it – even if they …

How to flash an LED

Today we are going to be learning how to flash an LED on a microcontroller by writing ARM assembly.

If you write software but are unfamiliar with basic electronics or embedded software development, there will be explanations of some fundamentals – I expect you will not feel left behind :).

If you'd …

Let's break CPython together, for fun and mischief

I promise that nothing we do here will be useful.

But I promise it will be entertaining, and (hopefully) educational:

• if you don't know anything about the CPython internals, you're about to learn (a bit)

• if you do know about the CPython internals, you're hopefully about to learn some new …

C++ is not a superset of C

If you're not familiar with both languages, you might have heard people say that C++ is a superset of C. If you're experienced in both languages, you'll know that this is not true at all.

Of course, C++ has many features that C does not; but there are also a …

C++20 concepts are not like Rust traits

At writing, Rust's Wikipedia currently says the following:

Functions can be given generic parameters, which usually require the generic type to implement a certain trait or traits. Within such a function, the generic value can only be used through those traits. This means that a generic function can be type-checked …

Rust: a future for real-time and safety-critical software without C or C++

Overview

Rust is a fairly new programming language that I'm really excited about. I gave a talk about it to my coworkers, primarily aimed at C++ programmers. This is that talk translated to a blog post. I hope you will be excited about Rust too by the end of this …

Making things at the Cambridge Makespace

I joined the Cambridge Makespace, my local community workshop, earlier this year. I've made a few nice simple things on a laser cutter since, and wanted to share a couple of my favourites.

I've been trained on a 3D printer and the CNC router and look forward to using those …

LED Hackers jacket for EMF camp

Hack the Planet!

The 1995 film Hackers is probably my favourite film. It is so much fun: I love the outrageous fashion, the rollerblading, the unabashed cheesiness. It represents a more hopeful time I wish to embody. This write up of it says all I could hope to, and says …

All things wooden wonderful

I haven't posted on my blog in ages! I just changed themes to the lovely Pelican Hyde, and thought it was time to update the content, too.

I made some exciting wooden things around Christmas time – or rather, I embellished one and designed another. Both were presents for others, and …

The Desk

A few months ago I bought a desk. It was the end of a long and consuming search to find one I liked that would fit in the 105cm wide alcove in my living room.

A combination of things meant I decided it would be a good idea to refinish …