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This is the newsletter version of [my website](https://www.hillelwayne.com). I post all website updates here. I also post regular content just for the newsletter, on topics like * Formal Methods and applications of math to programming * Software History and Culture * Fringetech and exotic tooling, and deep dives into niche topics * The philosophy and theory of software engineering You can see the archive of all public essays [here](https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/).

Your feed and you don't want it here? Just e-mail the birb.

Site URL: buttondown.email/hillelwayne

Feed URL: buttondown.email/hillelwayne/rss

Posts: 11

Followers: 2

NYC, New Webinar, Differential Testing

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/nyc-new-webinar-differential-testing/

Published: October 22, 2026 15:14

Been a while! Man, it's so much harder to write essays for a newsletter when I have a full time job writing essays for a company. So three bits of housekeeping first of all: As of last month I now live in NYC! Let me know if you want to get coffee or have…

What TLA+ can and can't check

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/what-tla-can-and-cant-check/

Published: September 30, 2026 13:27

Last week Boris Cherny, the inventor of Claude Code, mentioned that Opus was able to use TLA+1 to find race conditions in code. And now everybody on the internet is talking about formal verification. As a long-time educator (1 2) and advocate of…

The LLMs yearn for the spines

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/the-llms-yearn-for-the-spines/

Published: September 16, 2026 19:58

Earlier this year I worked on a couple of AI-generated TLA+ specifications, and one thing I've noticed was that they all used the word "spine" somewhere. Then I saw some non-TLA+ public projects use "spine" too and got curious if it was a new LLMism…

Vim wants you to control, VSCode wants you to consume

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/vim-wants-you-to-control-vscode-wants-you-to/

Published: August 18, 2026 16:26

Newsletter updates were sporadic in July because of two weddings, two conferences (with two different talks!), and finishing Logic for Programmers. Huge thank you to everybody who bought a copy, as well as for your patience with the schedule. There's some…

Logic for Programmers is Done

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/logic-for-programmers-is-done/

Published: July 29, 2026 15:43

It's done. Logic for Programmers is now 1.0 and available in print. Full announcement here, official website here, direct Amazon link here. If you got an early version of the ebook, you can go back to leanpub to download the 1.0 for free. This marks the…

Logic for Programmers v0.15, Livecoding

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/logic-for-programmers-v015-livecoding/

Published: June 17, 2026 16:40

There's a new release of Logic for Programmers! This one, version 0.15, is the first true release candidate. There's a couple of minor touch-ups I need to do but all content is in and copy edited and proofread. Unless something absolutely major comes up,…

Logic for Programmers extra credits

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/logic-for-programmers-extra-credits/

Published: June 2, 2026 14:48

So I said there wasn’t a proper newsletter this week, since I’m in Budapest prepping for a conference. But I still got a thing for y’all. There’s a lot of interesting topics I wanted to cover for Logic for Programmers, but the book is dense enough as it is…