lopsidedBrain

I would have really preferred a table of contents, either at the top or in a sidebar. It would have made it easier to skip over all the background materials that essentially rehashes an undergrad complier course.

I've found it incredibly useful to seek out potential users, either in HackerNews, niche subreddits, or small local conferences/workshops. There you are likely to find small projects like your own, some of whom will find your stuff useful. A small community of even 3-4 people providing feedback and encouragement to your work can go a long way.

If I can't find anybody interested in my work, I will take a good look at whether my project is actually as useful as I thought it was, and if I need to reorient my goals. Usually it's because existing tools already solve the problem well enough, and I didn't do my background research. Or because I didn't even have a problem statement in mind to begin with. Or I'll find that I didn't write enough documentation. Feedback is invaluable.

Sometimes I will work on something just because it's fun, or because I'm learning new things. That's okay, but in that case I have made an explicit decision to not care about popularity or usage.

Um, not really. Care to elaborate? If something is available open-sourced we're typically free to use it, as long as we are abiding by the license conditions.

If you want to learn the underlying math for calculating these, I highly recommend Robert Gallager's "Stochastic Processes".

It was one of the more eye-opening math books I ever read.

> Didn't find it added more value than other formal methods with less scope and ambition

For my own future reference, can you list a few other formal methods?