David Fritz, PhD
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| Email: "f" at this domain. | |
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David Fritz, PhD
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I'm David "Fritz" Fritz and currently work as the VP of Research for Gravwell, which builds an exotic form of grep. Fritz has a PhD in Electrical Engineering, mostly works as a programmer, and mostly works as a Go programmer at that.
Professional interests
Outside of computing, I have interests in film(!) photography and music.
yacc semantics. Provides first class support for errors and is self hosting.
math/big library primarily through the use of decimal floating point.
DLX) with reference Verilog implementation including several peripherals, assembler, C compiler, simulator, and libraries, all built from scratch. Designed for an undergraduate Computer Architecture curriculum, it at one point had associated lectures and content for several courses. Used at at least two universities.
What's with the "unitstep" in unitstep.org?
| The unit step function, or Heaviside step function, is a step function (looking forward to how many times I can write "step function" in this explanation) that is 0 for all negative values of x, and 1 for all positive values, giving rise to the "step" it takes at x=0. It's important in electrical engineering, especially as it relates to the Dirac delta function and it's use in frequency domain analysis. That's a lot and it didn't answer the question though. The reason I have the domain is that when I learned about the unit step, sometime during my sophomore year probably, something finally "clicked", and a lot of the math and physics I was being exposed to become more intuitive. It was the first time I really felt like an engineer. It was probably the work of a great professor that did that, but the unit step piece stuck as the "a ha!" moment. I bought the domain soon after (this was around 2002-2003?), lost it for about a decade in the 2010s, and got it back in the 2020s. It also sounds cool. |
Photography
| I am objectively bad at and very much enjoy film photography. Insomuch as photography can have a soul, or be "authentic", it's in film, not digital (though I also shoot digital). I have a darkroom, and process my own black and white, C-41, and E-6 film. There's still something magical about making black and white enlargements, and the resulting picture is unlike anything you can get from a printer. |
Bicycles
| I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is one of 5 "Platinum" cities in the United States for bicycle friendly communities, and is listed as the third most bikeable city in the United States. I do not own a car, but I do own several bicycles, all recreational or utilitarian (I do not wear spandex or race). Ring your bike bell and get out there! |
This section details several things I use professionally and personally that I feel opinionated enough about to mention.
vim. vim is where I spend most of my workday. While I do use several plugins (vim-go chief among them), I'm just as happy without them. I use plain old vim 9, not neovim. I am often logging into remote systems and it's just simpler to not have to carry an environment with me.
sh or zsh. I'm not too opinionated about this one actually, but rather I'm opinionated about bash. I don't think bash is bad, but I do think the way most people use it is. So many script shebangs begin innocuously with #!/bin/sh only to use some non-portable bash-ism. To that end I'll stick with the Almquist or Z shells. The Almquist shell is the default on FreeBSD, debian, and Ubuntu.