About

My name is Slava Akhmechet. I'm a first year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stony Brook University (a rather convenient way of buying time from society). I look like the alien on the logo or the human on the photo, depending on the hair day. My technical interests include programming languages (Lisp, Haskell, Prolog, Erlang, C++), compilers, web frameworks, non-relational database management systems (AllegroCache, future iterations of ReiserFS), user interface design, and many other things I can't list in a single sentence. You can see my resume here.

Occasionally I write technical articles and create various projects. Some people have found my work useful, so I'm sharing it with the world on this site. If you have any questions or comments about anything you see, please don't hesitate to contact me. My email address is coffeemug@gmail.com (I have a lot of faith in gmail's spam filters).

Articles

Below is a list of articles and tutorials I've written. I deliberately try to avoid non-technical subjects to limit my writings to my area of expertise, but it's likely that every once in a while there will be a slip. I hope the relatively low update frequency and narrow scope of these articles is made up for in quality.

• Zen, or the art of YC interview New!
• The Universal Law of Leverage
• Looking for a technical cofounder for RethinkDB New!
• The Y Combinator Experience
• Taming Doubt
• Taming Perfectionism
• The Reality of Enso
• Databases - A New Frontier
• Fractal - A Direct3D Demo of Natural Phenomena
• Querying s-expressions in Common Lisp
• A Lambda Calculus Reducer
• A User Interface Definition Language in Common Lisp
• Continuations-Based Web Applications in Common Lisp With Weblocks
• Haskell and Web Applications
• On Haskell, Intuition And Expressive Power
• Writing A Lisp Interpreter In Haskell
• What is LaTeX and Why You Should Care
• Erlang Style Concurrency
• Functional Programming For The Rest of Us
• The Nature of Lisp

Current Projects

These are some recent projects I've started that occupy my time:

• RethinkDB - a MySQL storage engine optimized for solid state drives.

Other Projects

These are the projects I've started but no longer maintain:

• Weblocks - a web framework written in Common Lisp. Stephen Compall and Leslie Polzer have kindly agreed to take over Weblocks maintenance.
  
• cl-cont - a code walker that implements delimited continuations in Common Lisp.