about

ABOUT.md

Hi! My name is Will, and I’m a software engineer focused on performance, site-reliability, and team effectiveness. Before becoming a software engineer, I taught middle school English for two years in rural Yunnan with Teach for China. Class sizes of 55+ made me passionate about the potential and importance of ed-tech—it’s why I learned to program in the first place.

In my personal life, I enjoy writing, D&D, fantasy novels, 3d-printing coasters, and bad wordplay. I live in New Mexico with my wife and two wonderful children.

projects/

Mistwatch: a high fantasy novel set on a mountain-sized tree above a corrupted world.
mongo-hyperloglog: a MongoDB-backed implementation of the HyperLogLog algorithm for NodeJS. It is inferior in every way to Redis’s implementation.
node-fn-query: allows using NodeJS syntax on the command line with JSON documents. Meant to complement jq because I can never remember jq’s syntax.
allelify: run commands in parallel while storing logs in /tmp to limit noise.

em dash disclosure

I like em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and hyphens (-), and I know how to type them.¹ I also enjoy a well-placed ellipsis, but I didn’t know how to type one… until now. I believe that footnotes and sidenotes are superior to endnotes, appreciate the occasional fleuron, and at one point in my life, I knew what a colophon was.

All of this is to say: the words, punctuation marks, misspellings, and opinions on this site are my own.

The exception: I recently spent an hour trying to figure out how to type em dashes in helix when running in a ghostty terminal, and I couldn’t figure out an ergonomic way to do it.

While we’re talking em dashes, I think the more European style – en dashes with spaces – looks better and doesn’t carry the same suggestion of AI-assisted writing, but inertia has kept me using the American style.

In general, looking at em dashes to detect AI writing seems far too fragile. gsed 's|–|--|g' takes about three seconds to write. Or tr A-Z a-z. Or jotting down a quick instruction to “avoid obvious AI-writing tells.” Having an easy way to detect potential slop is useful, but I think it’s easy to develop a false sense of confidence about your ability to detect AI-written work because you’ve gotten good at spotting the most obvious examples. ↩︎