The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Distributed systems / cloud

Andrew Helwer

ahelwer.ca

Software engineer with over a decade of professional experience. Currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft Azure Storage in Seattle, WA, USA. BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. See my full résumé here. Technical interests include deterministic simulation testi

Distributed systems / cloudTesting / QAC++

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
31 from 1 Jan 2001 to 26 Sep 2026
Posting
now and then (5 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://ahelwer.ca/index.xml

2026 4

  1. Can we have reachability properties in TLA⁺?
  2. Textbook review: Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?
  3. The changing role of finite-state model checking
  4. Laptops all have built-in security tokens these days

2025 3

  1. Let go of StackOverflow; communities must take ownership
  2. A supposedly worthwhile contract I'll never do again
  3. The current state of TLA⁺ development

2024 2

  1. TLA⁺ is more than a DSL for breadth-first search
  2. TLA⁺ Unicode support

2023 9

  1. Wrangling monotonic systems in TLA⁺
  2. FOSS I Love
  3. Inlining SVGs for Dark Mode
  4. Using TLA⁺ at Work
  5. Pseudocode Showdown
  6. Google Groups has been left to die
  7. Can sanitizers find the two bugs I wrote in C++?
  8. Two C++ bugs I wrote
  9. Writing a TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar

2022 3

  1. What's the difference between a computer and a rock?
  2. The Missing Prelude to The Little Typer's Trickiest Chapter
  3. Regexes in the Z3 Theorem Prover

2020 5

  1. Two pictures of quantum computation
  2. How do you reason about a probabilistic distributed system?
  3. Meditation
  4. Taking my home work setup seriously
  5. Doing a math assignment with the Lean theorem prover

2019 1

  1. Simulating physical reality with a quantum computer

2018 3

  1. Walking the faster-than-light tightrope
  2. Checking Firewall Equivalence with Z3
  3. Formal Verification, Casually Explained

2001 1

  1. Resume