Why am I doing this?
I’ve loved computers since I was a small kid. In the years since then, I’ve morphed into a computer science academic, and despite using computers every day, I still love them.
I also like writing. In an era where large language models will happily write everything for you, this is probably a dying skill, but I enjoy it and look for opportunities to practice it.
One day I hope to write a book about computers, and why I find them so fascinating, but in the meantime I’ll just write here.
What will I write? Who knows! Probably about things I find interesting. This might include programming languages, machine learning, computer architectures and the theory of computer science. Anything but databases really. I never liked databases.
If you want to know where the name comes from, see:
Fetch, Decode, What???
The name of this substack may sound a bit sinister, but rest assured that nothing was killed whilst making it. It’s named after the fetch-decode-execute cycle, a key but under-appreciated component of every computer. At the heart of a computer is a processor. Processors run programs. Programs are written in all sorts of programming languages, but before …