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Pandaí or "pandy" for a tin mug or jug

Hannah McLaughlin — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Childhood memories

My mother was talking about her childhood summers in rural Donegal, and used the word "pandy" to describe the tin drinking vessels she was often tasked with bringing to the men out working, along with a pail of water from the spring well to fill the vessels from …

Goidé mar a deirtear "frog" i nGaedhilg?

Hannah McLaughlin — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cuairteoir gan iarraidh: an uninvited guest

Two months ago I was sitting on the sofa cuddling my cat when, out of the corner of my eye, I seen something small and dark hop into the room through the open doorway. I knew I'd seen a frog, but my brain was …

"The most common vowel in English"?

Hannah McLaughlin — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

[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

Hannah McLaughlin — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0100

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

Hannah McLaughlin — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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

Hannah McLaughlin — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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 …

Emulating an STM32F4 in QEMU to test ARM assembly

Hannah McLaughlin — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0100

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

Hannah McLaughlin — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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

Hannah McLaughlin — Sun, 13 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0100

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

Hannah McLaughlin — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0100

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

Hannah McLaughlin — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0100

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++

Hannah McLaughlin — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0100

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 …