Computer Enhance Summer News!

I certainly hope none of you were planning a summer vacation.

I know things are supposed to slow down during the summer, but for whatever reason, the opposite is happening here at Computer Enhance. Spring was a bit slow, but summer is shaping up to be jam-packed.

To make everything easier to follow, I’ve prepared an at-a-glance list of what’s happening over the next two months, in chronological order:

• The Performance-Aware Programming series is starting SIMD and uop analysis now. I know this is something people have been looking forward to, so I hope everyone is ready to dive in! There will be a new video every week throughout the summer as we take our haversine computation and transform it into something that flows optimally through a modern CPU.

• The Meow the Infinite Book 3 Kickstarter opens Monday. For those of you who don’t know, I did the writing for an all-ages graphic novel series called Meow the Infinite. The third and final book in the trilogy is now complete, and we’re doing a Kickstarter for the print run. Together, the three books tell an epic 750-page story through beautiful artwork by Anna Rettberg. If you’re looking for a great series to read with your kids, you can sign up here to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live. The first two books will also be available from the Kickstarter while supplies last.

• I’m now a regular guest on The Standup podcast. Since we liked getting together and talking about random tech stuff, Prime, Teej, Trash and I started a podcast. If you’ve enjoyed my appearances on Prime’s channel, this is essentially an extension of that, but with a bit more silliness and broader variety of topics. Episodes are typically aired live on Prime’s live channels Wednesday mornings, and VODs appear a week later or so.

• I’ll be speaking at the US Cybergames on June 12th. I told them I don’t do infosec, but, I suppose security events are looking for people who can provide low-level hardware explanations for newcomers, too! So I will be doing a live discussion with folks from the US Cybergames organization as part of their 5th annual cybergames event. I will try to make a recording available to you here on Computer Enhance, since I’m not sure how accessible the livestream will be to people outside the event itself.

• I’ll be speaking at the inaugural Better Software Conference in mid-July. This will be my one big “prepared lecture” for the year, and it’s a historical software architecture talk I hope all of you will find interesting! I will of course be providing a video and article version for subscribers here on Computer Enhance after the presentation, but there may also be a livestream of the talk, so I will keep you posted as I find out the specifics.

• I will be debuting a new “Premature Optimization is the Root of All Evil” article and video at the end of July. This is something I’ve been working on for a while, since I’m tired of people abusing the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. A lot of historical research went into the preparation, and I suspect even people who know the original context of the phrase will be surprised at some of the historical documents I’ll be covering. There was certainly a lot about this phrase that I didn’t know before I started digging!

Phew! I think that’s everything. Hope to see you all — at least virtually — at one or more of the summer events, and as always, thanks for watching / reading!

— Casey