Back to building. I moved to Seattle and rejoined Microsoft.
Austin Henley
@azhenley.bsky.social
Associate Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University⚡️AI and developer tools⚡️ex startup, ex Microsoft https://austinhenley.com/
“Hey ChatGPT, draw the optimal route for survival to cross the US in the early 1800s”
I've written up my understanding of SDF and MSDF fonts, and how to use them with msdfgen+webgl: www.redblobgames.com/articles/sdf... (I'll post it on my blog soon too)
“The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.”
I made a simulator for the math puzzle shared by @3blue1brown.com in his latest video. It stumped me! Try it out: austinhenley.com/blog/ladybug...
Simulating the ladybug clock puzzle
3Blue1Brown shared a fun puzzle that stumped me, so I wrote a simulator to understand it.
austinhenley.com
I canceled my book deal. What do I do with the draft now?! austinhenley.com/blog/cancele...
I canceled my book deal
I've always wanted to write a book, and I was close, but not this time.
austinhenley.com
My December project: Implement a programming language and then use it to make a game. I’m calling it Langjam Gamejam.
The last day of Techstars. It was 12 weeks of building and learning every day. Highly, highly recommend.
I know what I’m doing this weekend: building a compiler in five projects
The urge to move off grid and make gameboy games in assembly.
The design space of AI coding assistants based on an analysis of 90 tools. They identified 10 design dimensions covering where the tool lives, how you ask it, who starts it, etc. I wrote a blog post summarizing the findings…
This weekend’s fun project? A baby type checker for Python. austinhenley.com/blog/babytyp...
Baby's first type checker
Let's build a Python type checker in 300 lines of code.
austinhenley.com
New course coming this fall where we apply the latest and great AI dev tools to all aspects of development. You know it’s going to be good when there are typos. Taught by the esteemed @abegel.bsky.social and me.
How would you grade students knowing that ChatGPT can ace most assignments? austinhenley.com/blog/aihomew...
Assessing students in the era of AI
How do we know if students are learning if ChatGPT is doing the work?
austinhenley.com
On this week's episode, @digiglean.bsky.social and I talk about measuring the speed of substring search, dictionary structure, Enum, and more. With content from: @stephengruppetta.com @mathspp.com @azhenley.bsky.social and others not on the 🦋
Episode #257: Comparing Real-World Python Performance Against Big O – The Real Python Podcast
How does the performance of an algorithm hold up when you put it into a realistic context? Where might Python code defy Big O notation expectations when using a profiler? Christopher Trudeau is back…
buff.ly
After a long week, I love to sit down and write C code without any AI or autocomplete. It’s very meditating.
I never expected to blog, let alone be writing this much! 100 posts done. How many more to go? austinhenley.com/blog/100.html
100 blog posts, 6 years, 5 million views
I never thought I'd write even one post.
austinhenley.com
Some Friday morning digging into the CPython codebase to figure out the fastest way to do string processing: austinhenley.com/blog/vowels....
The fastest way to detect a vowel in a string
Diving into CPython, bytecode, regex, and algorithmic analysis to find the fastest method.
austinhenley.com
New blog post: AI at Amazon: a case study of britteleness surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/06/08/a...
AI at Amazon: a case study of brittleness
A year ago, Mihail Eric wrote a blog post detailing his experiences working on AI inside Amazon: How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet. It’s a great …
surfingcomplexity.blog