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Séb’s notes

100 days of code: Day 0 of learning TLA+ for regular software development

I’ve been contemplating the idea of ramping up on formal specification for a long while.

But the learning curve always felt like «it’s going to be a learning cliff». I saw it as a curiosity, but not something really useful for the day-to-day job.

Then this morning, I watched Marianne Bellotti’s Formal Specification and Taming Other People’s Tech talk from Strangeloop last year.

This talk made me consider it again.

And since I saw many tweets in the last weeks about the #100DaysOfCode challenge, it was like the universe talking to me: let’s give it a try!

I’m going to do my best to walk the walk of this challenge, daily, over the next months.
And I’ll do my best to share the learnings with you here (probably not a daily basis though).

Beyond the basics of the language and method, I’m looking forward to seeing how much this improves my thinking and my analysis in my daily job.
I’m working on standard backend stuff. I am not building a database nor a distributed system from scratch. But our data-flows rely on such systems. And our algorithms may contain subtle flows in subtle ways in how we use these systems.

Let’s see how it goes.

If you’re interested in this, keep an eye on my notes in the next weeks. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ll also share the updates there.

Wish me good luck.