Interview and RacketCon talk

I haven’t posted here in awhile because I’ve been busy with a variety of things in September, including an interview for IEEE Computer magazine and a talk about Frog at RacketCon. And I’m writing this in Japan.

Interview

Brian Gaff interviews me on the topic, “So You Want to Start a Software Company?”. The written interview appears in the October 2013 issue of IEEE Computer magazine. Although I don’t have a URL to that yet¹, Brian and I also did a follow-up podcast you can listen to here.

Although I think the interview is mostly common-sense stuff, it might be useful to someone who is starting a company.

RacketCon

At RacketCon I gave a 10 minute talk about Frog. The video is here. This was the third RacketCon and I think by far the best one. There was a really nice variety of talks, ranging from practical to PL/academic and everything in between.

I also stopped by ICFP since it was held in Boston this year. Most of the presentations were waaaay over my head. I was one of the very few not associated with academia or corporate research. Although it wouldn’t have been worthwhile (for me) to travel for it, it was interesting to see firsthand.

Japan

I’m typing this blog post in Japan. Two aspects to that.

The trip to Japan is the first one I’ve done purely for fun, in many years. I had to travel here three or four times a year for work, for many years. But I couldn’t take many — or any — free days on most of those trips. So I thought it would be fun to return as a “tourist”. Or maybe I miss the extreme jet lag, in some variation of Stockholm Syndrome. Someone once said, “jet lag is the best drug”. Although I’m not qualified to verify that claim empirically, there is something surreal about a 13 hour shift. On the other hand it also has its soul-sucking moments, as Lost in Translation portrayed so well.

The other aspect is that I’m typing this SSH-ing into a VPS, using a ChromeBook Pixel as the client. This is a bit of an experiment, which I’ll write about more if it works well.