The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Fernando Borretti

borretti.me

Personal website of Fernando Borretti.

Essays / personalAI / MLLisp / Clojure / SchemeSoftware / engineering practice

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
114 from 7 Jun 2015 to 27 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (32 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://borretti.me/feed.xml

2026 24

  1. We Won’t “Just Hang Out”
  2. No Man Is an Island
  3. The Other Road
  4. The Education of a Doomer
  5. On Inevitability
  6. Futurism Is Always Extreme
  7. A Syncthing and SQLite Gotcha
  8. Our Servants Will Do That For Us
  9. AI Alignment as a Thought-Terminating Cliche
  10. Books I Enjoyed In 2026H1
  11. The Contracting Circle
  12. Review: Job-Less Utopia
  13. Mathematics Without Mathematicians
  14. When The Future Doesn’t Need Us
  15. No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass
  16. On Vulgar Materialism
  17. Human Routers of Machine Words
  18. How To Read More
  19. Human Bottlenecks
  20. The Applicability of Spaced Repetition
  21. Notes on the Hantavirus Outbreak
  22. Some Data Should Be Code
  23. Letting Claude Play Text Adventures
  24. There Is No New Aesthetics

2025 22

  1. Using the Brother DS-640 Scanner on NixOS
  2. 1Password Dependency Breaks Syntax Highlighting
  3. Books I Enjoyed in 2025
  4. Coarse is Better
  5. I Wish People Were More Public
  6. Ad-Hoc Emacs Packages with Nix
  7. Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
  8. Agda on NixOS
  9. Hashcards: A Plain-Text Spaced Repetition System
  10. Adding Planets to Celestia on macOS
  11. Notes on Managing ADHD
  12. Inboxes are Underrated
  13. You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy
  14. Two Years of Rust
  15. My Backup Infrastructure, 2025 Edition
  16. We Live In a Golden Age of Interoperability
  17. Domain-Agnostic and Domain-Specific Tools
  18. Non-Fiction Has Bad Incentives
  19. Composable SQL
  20. Adding Colour to macOS Folder Icons
  21. Implementing FSRS in 100 Lines
  22. How I Use Claude

2024 7

  1. Implementing SM-2 in Rust
  2. Ephemerality in User Interfaces
  3. Client Freedom
  4. The Best Emacs Microfeature
  5. The Design Space of Wikis
  6. Type Inference Was a Mistake
  7. Thoughts on LLM Agents

2023 31

  1. You Need More Constraints
  2. Type Systems for Memory Safety
  3. Why Checked Exceptions Failed
  4. Test Against Reality
  5. Test Autodiscovery is a Silver Bullet
  6. Second-Class References
  7. Depth-First Procrastination
  8. Why Lisp Syntax Works
  9. Sketch of a Post-ORM
  10. Language Pragmatics Engineering
  11. What is a Software Engineer?
  12. Typing Persian in Emacs
  13. Language Tooling Antipatterns
  14. Return Reasons, Not Booleans
  15. NixOS for the Impatient
  16. How Capabilities Work in Austral
  17. Two Years of OCaml
  18. Dependency Resolution Made Simple
  19. My Experience with Bupropion
  20. The Best of Orion’s Arm
  21. Effective Spaced Repetition
  22. Spaced Repetition is Checkpointing for Learning
  23. Design of the Austral Compiler
  24. The Gallery of Sand
  25. And Yet It Understands
  26. Building a DIY Clozemaster
  27. Shells are Two Things
  28. How Austral’s Linear Type Checker Works
  29. Better XML Editing for Emacs
  30. A Brief Defense of XML
  31. Roam, Twenty Years Before Roam

2022 7

  1. Introducing Austral: A Systems Language with Linear Types and Capabilities
  2. Unbundling Tools for Thought
  3. Astronomical Calculations for Hard SF in Common Lisp
  4. You’re Not Going Anywhere
  5. Simplicity and Survival
  6. First Impressions of Mochi
  7. Lessons from Writing a Compiler

2021 6

  1. Signed Integers are Asymmetrical
  2. Reading a File in OCaml on Windows
  3. Languages are not Ecosystems
  4. Parsing with Menhir, Part I: Forth
  5. Parsing with Menhir
  6. Linear Types and Exceptions

2019 4

  1. Compiling LLVM IR to Binary
  2. Forth and Complexity
  3. The Uselessness of the Accept-Language Header
  4. Linear Types and Safety

2018 8

  1. A Bibliography of 2018
  2. FreeBSD with Encrypted ZFS and X11 on a Laptop
  3. Portable Backups with Duplicity and GnuPG
  4. A Case Study in Propositional Logic
  5. Calling C from MLton
  6. February Updates
  7. Libraries: The Database Engineering Perspective
  8. The Twelve Islanders Problem

2017 2

  1. Inheritance and Disjunctions
  2. A Wishlist of Zero-Cost Abstractions

2016 1

  1. Using LMDB from Common Lisp

2015 2

  1. State of the Common Lisp Ecosystem, 2015
  2. Common Lisp with Travis and Coveralls