My name is Benjamin (often 'bdunahu'), and this is my personal site!

I am currently attending my final semester at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I am studying computer science. I am part of the umass webring. Try it and pretend the majority of the internet doesn't exist!

Some programming, of course; I like experimenting with and building tools for existing software.

I recently did some independent work at the UMass Plasma lab related to a specialized python asyncio profiler. In the case of asyncio, developers are in charge of having their tasks share resources. If you make a mistake (i.e., by having a task not yield to other tasks), traditional profilers may not find it, because they are concerned with ranking code by total execution time, not considering the delicate timing between all tasks competing to run on the same thread. My profiler 'Nemesis', would randomly select synchronous logic to speedup during execution similar to the Coz profiler and measure the average latency changes of all other tasks to report on real optimization impacts. This worked okay, but was limited in usefulness since it required a constant workload across the experiments to have actionable results. It was still a great learning experience!

I previously worked on my own C compiler after working on a from-scratch compiler in coursework. I used this second compiler to learn the basics of guile scheme. This website is written in scheme; and my computing environments are similarly configured using GuixSD. I recently started contributing patches and packages. I have a little experience with Arch (Parabola) and Debian in maintaining this server. Someday, I may host my web, mail, IRC bouncer, etc. with scheme and Guix too, but that requires downtime and a lot of work on top of the work already put in.

I write, sometimes technical papers for research and classwork, but also enjoy creative writing. I do poetry occasionally. Though I prefer plot and character design (likely cultivated from many hours playing dungeons and dragons), and am currently focused on a series of short stories featuring a timeline in which the goddess Freya is spiteful in the aftermath of the Aesir-Vanir war. It's been suggested she's the same seer who was mistreated (if that's how you should call burned to death three times) by the Aesir due to envy. Since she is essentially traded as a hostage to the Aesir in the aftermath of the war, why shouldn't she be using her seer magic venomously behind their backs? It's currently set in Midgard, Jotunheim, and the passages in-between, following her shamelessly unhelpful servants.

I also read a lot of Sword and Sorcery. My favorite series is the Morlock Ambrosius series by James Enge; but you can read more about things I find cool here. While the protagonists in these stories are capable enough of saving the world, what makes it interesting is the lack of heroism and the reality that they are their own worst enemy, (if not the secondary antagonist).