Upgraded to one of the latest iPhone recently. First time I clicked on “transfer data from old phone”. I’m used to reinstalling the operating system every couple of months from when I used Windows. It took maybe 15 minutes with close to 0 interactions. Everything was transferred. I was already authenticated in apps. What took manual steps was eSIM transfers.
I don’t remember exact steps so there could have been a bit more. But it was an impressive experience and I told my geek friends about it. They were surprised this is the first time I used this feature.
I love P and have used it for personal projects (like OSWALD^1) and at work (for some Redpanda components).
I find it very approachable. If you know some basic theory of distributed systems and have been exposed to actors and state machines before, you should be able to have some non trivial models in a few days at days.
Things get slightly more complicated when you begin to ask yourself whether or not you have validated enough of the state space to have confidence in the design. The verifier has a much of options who care poorly documented.
Recently, P was extended to support exploring the entire state space (PEX mode) as well as a prover. These have only rudimentary documentation. I learned about them more by looking at code.
According to public information, AWS uses both and not only. AWS wrote a paper on the topic with some details about their applications of
formal methods^1. AWS is a large org though, it would be hard to generalise or reduce their approach to any single method.
I do often ask Claude Code or Gemini CLI to write commits. I agree with you on why being important. Majority of these being bug fixes accompanied tests where the why is easily inferred from the change/newly added tests and their comments.
*Engines That Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond* by Alasdair G. M. Nairn
I’ve had a few aha moments while reading this book. Although it's primarily written from an investor's perspective, it does contain a fair share of insight about creation and commercialisation of technology, the mechanics of monopolies, government involvement, foreign affairs, etc.
A “note taking” app after spending years looking for “the right one”. Nothing ground breaking, similar to most other “connected notes” apps but with one small difference: everything is built for my brain workflow rather than the other way around.
Maybe, one day, after I’m satisfied with its functionality I’ll make it open(-source). For now, in the interest of keeping friction low, moving fast and breaking things, it’s pretty private.