I'm Youwen. You can visit me at my website or at my blog.
I care deeply about systems and how we can make them more reliable and resilient. To that end I contribute to various open source projects that aim to increase reproducibility and determinism in software systems at scale.
I run a purely functional (in the true mathematical sense) computing environment that enables the deterministic deployment of software, configuration, and infrastructure all the way down the stack. This includes both the system itself, which can never mutate state and must be rebuilt for modifications to be made, as well as a purely functional userspace, that keeps programs configured precisely as described and managed transactionally. My text editor is configured in a Lisp called Fennel and deployed in a purely functional fashion by Nix.
Additionally, I prefer to work on and with software that respects my freedom. In fact my M1 Macbook Pro runs an entirely free reverse engineered graphics and driver stack. All of my computers run a free GNU/Linux operating system.
Key benefits of my approach to computing include:
- fearless hacking: as the system is rebuilt each time it is modified, it can simply transactionally rollback to a previous system generation.
- text-based and keyboard driven: by keeping the system entirely deterministic (not just technically, but philosophically), I can ditch unwieldy graphical interfaces and build a text-centered user experience.
- trustless full source bootstrap: secure yourself from malevolent state actors and resist the KTH by bootstrapping the entire system from its free source code and a minimal amount of binary seeds.
Behold: a directed acyclic graph of my entire operating system and each of its components. This is made possible because a purely functional software deployment model necessarily implies the existence of an explicit dependency graph that can be realized:
In the boring real world I study mathematics in paradise at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
 | If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be William S. Massey's A Basic Course in Algebraic Topology. I am intended to serve as a textbook for a course in algebraic topology at the beginning graduate level. The main topics covered are the classification of compact 2-manifolds, the fundamental group, covering spaces, singular homology theory, and singular cohomology theory. These topics are developed systematically, avoiding all unecessary definitions, terminology, and technical machinery. Wherever possible, the geometric motivation behind the various concepts is emphasized. Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test |