Latest posts
- Summary of reading: April - June 2026Jul 01, 2026Eli Bendersky
"The Nuremberg Trial" by John Tusa and Ann Tusa - a detailed, meticulously researched account of the Nuremberg Trials. There's not a whole lot of side questing in this book - it's all focused on the trials themselves. Interesting read overall, though somewhat dry and academic. "Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir" by Craig Mod - a kind of travelogue of the author walking across Japan's Ki
- Plugins case study: PluggyJun 14, 2026Eli Bendersky
Recently I came upon Pluggy, a Python library for developing plugin systems. It was originally developed as part of the pytest project - known for its rich plugin ecosystem - and later extracted into a standalone library. You're supposed to reach out for Pluggy if you want to add a plugin system to your tool or library and want to use something proven rather than rolling your own. In this post I w
- Thoughts on starting new projects with LLM agentsJun 07, 2026Eli Bendersky
A few months ago I wrote about using LLM agents to help restructuring one of my Python projects. It's worth beginning by saying that the rewrite has been successful by all reasonable measures; I've been able to continue maintaining that project since then without an issue. In this post, I want to discuss another project I've recently completed with significant help from agents: watgo. In this proj
- Notes on Fourier seriesMay 28, 2026Eli Bendersky
The trigonometric Fourier series is a beautiful mathematical theory that shows how to decompose a periodic function into an infinite sum of sinusoids. These are my notes on the subject, with some examples and the connection to linear algebra in Hilbert space. Coefficients of Fourier series Let’s assume that is a well-behaved 2L-periodic [1] function and that we can find coefficients a_n and b_n s
- Scaling, stretching and shifting sinusoidsMay 02, 2026Eli Bendersky
This is a brief and simple [1] explanation of how to adjust the standard sinusoid sin(x) to change its amplitude, frequency and phase shift. More precisely, given the general function: \[s(x)=A\cdot sin(w\cdot x+\theta)\] We’ll see how adjusting the parameters , and affect the shape of s(x). Each section below covers one of these aspects mathematically, and you can use the demo at the bottom to