samwho

👋 Hi.

I'm Sam. Husband, dad, programmer, whisky-drinker, infrequent writer. I love video games, lie-ins, cold weather, and being indoors. I buy more books than I read, I'm scared of spiders and wasps, and I put ice in my whisky.

It's really nice to meet you.

🎨 I visualise.

Since the start of 2023 I've been creating visual and interactive introductions to computer science topics. Each post takes anywhere from one to three months to create, and I aim to cover the material in a bottom-up fashion, starting from the simplest example and working up.

Load Balancing

Memory Allocation

Hashing

Retries

Bloom Filters

Queueing

Given how long these take to make, I've also set up a Patreon to support their development. I create detailed behind-the-scenes post exclusive for Patrons.

💌 I newsletter.

I just use this to notify folks when I've made a new visual blog post, so it only gets a few emails per year. If you want to keep up to date with me this way, here's the link: https://buttondown.email/samwho

🎙️ I talk.

I've been a guest on the following podcasts:

And I've given the following talks:

😈 I tinker.

I create little fun stand-alone pages with dumb ideas I've had.

  • Six Word Story has you writing stories with everyone in the world, six words at a time.
  • Ping lets you send me a push notification any time you want.

⌨️ I write

As well as visualising things, I have written some more traditional blog posts. You can see a list of them all here.

I've written blog posts for companies I've worked for.

👨🏻‍💻 I code.

You can find me on GitHub. Here are some of the things I've written and am proud of:

  • spacer: a silly little CLI tool to add spacers to command output
  • hmm: a little command line note taking tool written in Rust
  • rust-debugger: a ptrace-based debugger written in Rust
  • streamdeck: Go bindings for the StreamDeck API
  • livesplit: Go bindings for the LiveSplit API

📖 I read.

My all-time favourite things on the internet can be found here. If you read them and like them, tweet me and tell me! I'd love to chat about them with you.

I've been reviewing technical books for Pragmatic Bookshelf for many years. I started doing it during university as a way to get free books, and have carried it on in to my professional life. You'll find me acknowledged in the following books, and many others:

🌐 I Internet.