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marcpaq

118 karma · joined September 21, 2016

I'm a technical writer with lots of experience documenting big complex systems for demanding technical and non-technical users.

And I have blogs:

https://egopontem.com https://purserclub.com

submissionscomments
marcpaq··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2023)
SEEKING WORK | Montreal | Remote | Technical writer

Hi! You're building something amazing and I can show people how to use it.

I'm a technical writer who specializes in helping growing companies build their technical content. I have extensive experience in documenting complex systems for demanding technical and non-technical users. And I've helped documentation teams to write more and fuss less by implementing process improvements and automation.

Past projects: documenting embedded software development tools, distributed radiology workflow systems, machine learning platforms, and open source software.

My experience and projects:

https://egopontem.com

https://github.com/marcpaq

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpaq/

Let me know if you're interested in starting your technical content on the right foot: marcpaq@egopontem.com

marcpaq··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2023)
SEEKING WORK | Montreal | Remote | Technical writer

I'm a technical writer who specializes in helping growing companies build technical content. Let me handle your technical content so your devs can do what they do best.

I have extensive experience in documenting complex systems for demanding technical and non-technical users. And I've helped documentation teams to write more and fuss less by implementing process improvements and automation. Past projects include documenting embedded software development tools, distributed radiology workflow systems, machine learning platforms, and open source software.

My experience and projects:

https://github.com/marcpaq

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpaq/

https://egopontem.com

Let me know if you're interested in starting your technical content on the right foot: marcpaq@egopontem.com

marcpaq··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2023)
SEEKING WORK | Montreal & Barcelona | Remote | Technical writer

I'm a technical writer who specializes in helping growing companies build technical content. Let me handle your technical content so your devs can do what they do best.

I have extensive experience in documenting complex systems for demanding technical and non-technical users. And I've helped documentation teams to write more and fuss less by implementing process improvements and automation. Past projects include documenting embedded software development tools, distributed radiology workflow systems, machine learning platforms, and open source software.

My experience and projects:

https://github.com/marcpaq

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpaq/

https://egopontem.com

Let me know if you're interested in starting your technical content on the right foot: marcpaq@egopontem.com

marcpaq··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2023)
SEEKING WORK | Montreal | Remote

I'm a technical writer who specializes in helping growing companies build technical content.

I have extensive experience in documenting complex systems for demanding technical and non-technical users. And I've helped documentation teams to write more and fuss less by implementing process improvements and automation. Past projects include documenting embedded software development tools, distributed radiology workflow systems, machine learning platforms, and open source software.

My experience and projects:

https://github.com/marcpaq

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpaq/

https://egopontem.com

Let me know if you're interested in starting your technical content on the right foot: marcpaq@egopontem.com

marcpaq··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2022)
SEEKING WORK | Montreal | Remote

I'm a technical writer who specializes in helping growing companies build technical content.

I have extensive experience in documenting complex systems for demanding technical and non-technical users. And I've helped documentation teams to write more and fuss less by implementing process improvements and automation. Past projects include documenting embedded software development tools, distributed radiology workflow systems, machine learning platforms, and open source software.

My experience and projects:

https://github.com/marcpaq

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpaq/

https://egopontem.com

Let me know if you're interested in starting your technical content on the right foot: marcpaq@egopontem.com

marcpaq··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2022)
SEEKING WORK | Montreal | Remote

I'm a technical writer who specializes in helping growing companies build technical content.

I'm a technical writer with lots of experience documenting big complicated systems for demanding technical and non-technical audiences. I've documented embedded & FPGA dev tools, machine learning & NLP platforms, radiology workflow systems, and other things.

My experience and projects:

https://github.com/marcpaq

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpaq/

https://egopontem.com

Let me know if you're interested in starting your technical content on the right foot: marcpaq@egopontem.com

marcpaq··on Ask HN: How to level up your technical writing?
Tech writer here.

The absolute, invariable first rule in tech writing is to know your audience.

Understand not just their technical problems but take the time to empathize with why they have these problems in the first place.

Tech writing isn't about documenting, it's about finding the best way to explain something to people so they can solve their problems.

Oh, and use an editor (the human kind, not the digital kind.)

marcpaq··on Why Are Canadian Construction Costs So High? (2018)
> - corruption, especially in QC

Quebec removed a blindfold with the Charbonneau Commission.

A sincere question: have other provinces done the same recently? What did they discover?

> - over-the-top safety requirements, regardless of project size. E.g. in Toronto every road work sight has a police officer present who’s just standing there bored out of their mind.

How much does that add to a project that costs 9-10 digits?

> - lack of experience and expertise. Canada is a relatively young country with very few major infra projects under its belt.

What's your definition of "major infra projects?"

Canada is geographically enormous, with extreme climate and terrain, and clustered populations. Yet somehow they've built infrastructure for a modern, vibrant economy.

Examples:

70 years of remote hydro-electric plants and a transmission network for half a dozen provinces and states.[1]

50 years of nuclear power plants in half a dozen countries.[2]

A counter example for corruption (Canada is currently removing another blindfold), but about a century of bridges, tunnels, highways around the world.[3]

> - lack of care by citizens. Most Canadians aren’t well travelled outside of Americas.

Citation?

> They don’t know what good cities look and feel like.

Ouch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Québec

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_of_Canada_Limite...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNC-Lavalin

Edit: typo & clarity

marcpaq··on Show HN: Change Python code while it's running using a reloading loop
Are you paraphrasing ESR paraphrasing Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming?

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

Ref: http://philip.greenspun.com/research/

P.S. This is not a comment on TFA. Congratulations to the author on making Python even more interactive.

marcpaq··on A micro manual for Lisp – Not the whole truth (1978) [pdf]
An only slightly altered version for Raspberry Pi/ARM assembly:

https://github.com/marcpaq/arpilisp

marcpaq··on WordTsar – A Wordstar clone
My credentials: In high school and university, I used WordStar 3.3 on CP/M. Today I'm a technical writer. I reluctantly stopped using WordStar when WordPerfect pushed it off the stage.

It's hard to state advantages WordStar has over modern editors. Maybe looking at it in a historical context helps.

User friendly: WordStar was for non-technical users. "User friendly" was frequently abused in industry marketing. The implication of user hostility was real. You often had to assemble your computer from a kit. I don't mean plug in an SSD and a graphics card. I mean solder chips onto a board and cross your fingers. A non-techie could use WordStar out of the box.

Power users: Newbies dedicated 1/3 of screen space to an interactive command list. Power users used all screen space for text.

WYSIWYG: Editing and formatting were traditionally separate programs. Competitors sorta kinda integrated them. WordStar seamlessly combined them for the best WYSIWYG that display hardware allowed.

Flow: If there is a genuine advantage, this is it. WordStar was for professional touch typists, like secretaries and writers, paid to bang out words all day. But keyboards were simpler, typically 50-60 keys. WordStar used only Shift and Control as meta keys and laid out its keyboard commands intuitively. WordStar let you stay in the flow to get to your final draft quickly.

Adaptable: Computer, printer, and communication hardware rivaled the Cambrian explosion in variety and incompatibility. WordStar worked predictably on serial terminals, dedicated displays, and daisywheel and dot matrix printers, serial or parallel, one floppy or two.

Ecosystem: MicroPro and third parties supported WordStar with many add-on applications for spelling, mail merge, and so on. Yes, spell checking was an extra.

Nostalgia: WordStar pushed the envelope in its day. Comparing it to today's editors and word processors, WordStar is quaint. But maybe since then we've forgotten some important reasons about why we use computers. WordTsar might be a good reminder.

marcpaq··on Urn: A Lisp implementation for Lua
I hope this helps: https://github.com/marcpaq/b1fipl

I collect single-file language implementations. None in my collection (so far) use Lua, but I'm always on the lookout.

marcpaq··on Lisp in fewer than 200 lines of C
Arpilisp author here.

If you were to implement the same Lisp in C then compare, then maybe the assembly variant would be faster for the reasons you mention. Or maybe not.

Also, I modeled arpilisp after the original Lisp. That's barely a first step, and possibly the wrong first step, for anything non-trivial, including applications requiring a "super fast lisp that can compete with Go."

But I didn't write arpilisp for performance. I wrote it to learn and share. Enjoy!

marcpaq··on Lisp in fewer than 200 lines of C
Arpilisp author here.

Yes, jonesforth definitely inspired and influenced me; that's why Jones is first in the Acknowledgements section.

If you're curious, I keep a list of single-file implementations of programming languages (including jonesforth):

https://github.com/marcpaq/b1fipl

marcpaq··on Writing a Lisp: Explicit Stack and Stacktraces
The irony of implementing Lisp in assembly is that, almost for free (sorry about that), you get precise, convenient control of the memory situation. Just put the gc root exclusively in registers.

I wrote a Lisp interpreter in assembly that dedicates 4-5 registers for the current expression, eval environment, and so on. The mark-sweep collector starts from these registers.

https://github.com/marcpaq/arpilisp

marcpaq··on Make your own Lisp
It starts you from scratch and I'd say it's well done, maybe even be overdone for Lisp. But you get a good introduction to the essentials of language implementation for more complicated languages.

Shameless self-promotion: I wrote a Lisp interpreter in a single assembly file for Raspberry Pi. It also starts from scratch at an even lower level, to the point of ignoring standard libraries.

https://github.com/marcpaq/arpilisp

I was inspired by jonesforth, which, if you haven't read it, is a beautiful piece of work.

marcpaq··on Building a Lisp from scratch with Swift
Thanks. The inspiration was jonesforth.

I have no plans to extend it.

A similar project I've considered: write an Algol compiler in assembly. Algol is another elegant, influential language originally implemented in assembly.

marcpaq··on Building a Lisp from scratch with Swift
Funny you should say that:

https://github.com/marcpaq/arpilisp

marcpaq··on Why I wrote a book about interpreters
(Somewhat of a repost, but I'm a fan of these things.)

I had the same feeling, so I tried it out myself. Inspired by Jonesforth (highly recommended), I wrote an arguably complete Lisp interpreter in a single, heavily commented ARM assembly language file.

Lisp is an obvious target, with its minimal syntax and simple concepts. The first Lisp was written in assembly on a machine with comparable capacity to your laptop keyboard's microcontroller, after all.

I hope you find it useful:

https://github.com/marcpaq/arpilisp

marcpaq··on How to Write a Lisp Interpreter in Python (2010)
I estimate it took 60-70 hours, of which 2/3 of that was for the documentation.

Thanks for the compliment and the link to TSTC. I'll add it to my personal list.

marcpaq··on How to Write a Lisp Interpreter in Python (2010)
I'm always impressed how the magic of interpreters and compilers can be explained so succinctly.

Inspired by Jonesforth, I wrote a complete Lisp interpreter in a single ARM assembly file: https://github.com/marcpaq/arpilisp

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