# Intuitive Counter

> David Walend's blog about Scala, AI, graphs, and coding

Written by David Walend. Posts are licensed CC BY 4.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) - quote, translate, and redistribute them
freely with attribution. Code samples inside posts are public domain and need
no attribution at all.

The full text of every post is in the RSS feed at https://blog.walend.net/feed.xml.

## Posts

- [A Centaur's Gait](https://blog.walend.net/2026/08/centaur-hoofbeats/) - With Claude Code I'm able to code faster hour-by-hour, but at very uneven pace. I configured hooks to play a tone when Claude Code needs my attention.
- [Bounding Complexity in Scala Projects](https://blog.walend.net/2024/04/bounding-complexity-in-scala-projects/) - Li Haoyi's Principle of Least Power, applied to three of my own Scala projects. Scala works best as your own little language, kept deliberately small.
- [The 20-Minute Limit](https://blog.walend.net/2024/04/the-20-minute-limit/) - The first advice I give interns: don't be stuck more than 20 minutes. Long enough to try it yourself, short enough to keep tempo and ask a good question.
- [CQRS in a Relational Database via Slick](https://blog.walend.net/2024/04/cqrs-in-a-relational-database-via-slick/) - CQRS suits systems where inbound data is a stream of events but something needs a coherent view of state. How we built one on Slick and a relational database.
- [The New Hire Plan](https://blog.walend.net/2024/03/the-new-hire-plan/) - In the first two days of a new job I get the code building and one small change checked in. When I lead, I plan the first weeks and months the same way.
- [Implicit Pimp Suspicion](https://blog.walend.net/2016/06/Pimping-Config/) - I'm very suspicious of Scala's implicits and the pimp pattern. I pimped Typesafe Config's Config class to handle case class apply() constructors and Options.
- [Just apply(Config)](https://blog.walend.net/2016/05/Applying-Typesafe-Config/) - Try using apply methods in companion objects that take values from a TypeSafe Config instance parameter.
- [Parallel Disentangle](https://blog.walend.net/2015/11/Easy-Parallel/) - I added parallel versions of Dijkstra's and Brandes' algorithms to Disentangle. Writing the code was easy. Consider using them above about 100 nodes.
- [Renaming to Disentangle](https://blog.walend.net/2015/11/Rename-to-Disentangle/) - I renamed ScalaGraphMinimizer to Disentangle.
- [Testing With TypeSafe Config](https://blog.walend.net/2015/06/Test-With-TypeSafeConfig/) - I found a workable compromise for testing with different configurations using TypeSafe Config without starting a new JVM or turning the code inside out.
- [Escape to an Inner Object](https://blog.walend.net/2015/06/escape-from-inner-trait/) - I hit a puzzle with visibility, inner traits, and inner objects, while plugging semirings into Dijkstra's algorithm.
- [Between People at Enron](https://blog.walend.net/2015/02/Enron-Thing/) - Random graphs make poor tests for Brandes' betweenness, so I built a real social graph from a month of the Enron email corpus.
- [Generics and Semirings and Tilting at Windmills](https://blog.walend.net/2014/10/Semirings/) - Semirings let you change what shortest means in a shortest-path algorithm. Java's generics turned that into an eyesore; Scala's type families handle it cleanly.
- [Graphs, Now in Scala](https://blog.walend.net/2014/09/graphs-in-scala/) - JDigraph hit the limits of Java's type system. Scala lets me define the most general graph algorithms I can so I can specify what its node and edge types, and operators are to match my problem.
- [Back From the Break](https://blog.walend.net/2014/09/back-in/) - Alot changed in the five years since my last post on java.net. Oracle bought Sun, I moved to Scala and a social-network-analysis startup, and I miss writing. The blog is back.