Posts

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

About

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

tychoish.com is an eclectic blog on programming, documentation, software development, folk dance, science fiction literature, cyborgs, political economy, emacs, Common Lisp, Go, shape note singing, and hand knitting.

tycho garen (and tychoish) are the digital identities of Sam Kleinman, a Brooklyn-based software engineer and writer.

Biography

I grew up in St. Louis¹ and went to college in southern Wisconsin, before moving to the east coast, and finally settling in Brooklyn.

As a young human, I was always nerdy I have memories of tinkering with old computers and even trying to install Linux on them, without a lot of success. For whatever reason I was never particularly into science/math as a kid, and ended up majoring in Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies. I also rushed through college in 3 years. While I think I probably picked the wrong major,² finishing early was definitely the right choice: I had learned a lot and really didn’t want to be in rural Wisconsin any more.

For a couple of years, I lived in my hometown taught knitting lessons, writing a bunch, and disabusing myself of the idea that I wanted to go to graduate school. While I think that intellectualism remains central for me, I realized that I was actually quite interested in technology and computers, and also that somewhere in all of my formal education I’d managed to figure out how to get pretty good at teaching myself new things, relatively unassisted.

I started by writing documentation, which really ironed out a bunch of personal writing and editing idiosyncrasies, and eventually discovered through that I rather enjoyed doing sys-admining and software development work, and so here I am.

Meanwhile, I’d moved to the Philadelphia area and eventually New York City, the former being somewhat expected up until that point, and the later being totally surprising. In 2014 I moved to Brooklyn and it felt great, and I’ve never really looked back. I’m still making software, still doing cool things with Linux, still thinking about how people build technology, and how our decisions about technology impact our lives and our world.

Blogging

At one point I tried to separate blogging into different topics and areas, personal journals, topical material, technical projects, and so forth, and it never really seemed to work out: I have a lot of different interests and while I enjoy writing about what I’m working on, but I don’t think I want to personally be responsible for a small publishing empire, though there are categories and you can subscribe only to specific segments of blog, if you like.

In general, I’ve been writing a lot recently about a few areas, and don’t expect that this will change much in the coming months and years:

specific technologies and my projects with them: Common Lisp, Emacs, some application infrastructure projects in the Go programming language.
trends in contemporary technology and software development, ranging from the organization of technical teams, to the ways that various trends in software delivery impact the way that we build software
personal journal, to record more personal details or accounts of things I’m thinking about or working on.
knitting, to reflect on current projects, share ideas, and insights.

There may be other posts that address other topics, but as a genreal guide line that should cover the main points.

I’m super interested in hearing from folks both via email or comments. Be in touch!

Colophon

tychoish.com is published using a custom version hugo, that uses shimgo that cuts the build time by about an order of magnitude.

Comments rely on disqus.

Notes

Yeah, yeah, Metro High School. ↩︎
If I got a chance to choose again, I think I would do a double major in Anthropology and History. ↩︎

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