Manhattan Metric
Software and Science in Equal Measure
Hi! My name is Joshua Ballanco. I am a software engineer living in and working remotely from Greenville, SC. I've spoken at a number of different software development conferences around the world and have even been known to blog from time to time. I have a background in Computational Evolutionary Biology and I enjoy contributing to a number of different Open Source projects.
Get in Touch!
Recent Posts
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2026.08.03 – AI is Not Alive...Yet
There is a fundamental difference between AI and humans, and so long as that difference remains AI will never be "alive".
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2026.06.14 – Riding the AI Bicycle
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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2026.05.20 – Eureka - Part 2
Starting at the beginning with Perceptrons.
- 2026.04.25 – Eureka - Part 1
- 2026.04.09 – Software Farming
- 2026.04.04 – Blade Runner 2026
- 2026.04.01 – What Ever Happened To Fun?
- 2026.03.20 – The Singularity is Coming
- 2026.03.17 – LLMs - How did they get so good?
- 2026.03.09 – ChatGPT Told Me to Go Work for Anthropic
- 2026.02.26 – LLMs - What aren't they good for?
- 2026.01.19 – LLMs - What are they good for, anyway?
- 2024.09.30 – Some Types - Part 2
- 2024.08.30 – Some Types - Part 1
- 2018.04.11 – Why You Should Hire a PhD
- 2018.01.08 – Five (More) Reasons to Check Out Julia
- 2015.03.04 – One Last Emacs Try
- 2014.11.14 – Read Before You Write
- 2012.08.26 – What is a Manhattan Metric?
- 2009.08.21 – Aug. 19th: International "_why We Fork" Day
- 2009.08.19 – Code vs Create
Presentations and Conference Talks
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What's Eating Ruby?
2014.06.19 – RuLu | slides -
Community in Motion
2014.03.01 – Kod.io | video | slides -
Sure, I Could Learn Objective-C, but...
2013.10.26 – Kod.io | video | slides -
RubyMotion: Under the Hood
2013.10.12 – Wicked Good Ruby Conf | video | slides -
Getting Your Ruby EGOT
2013.08.18 – eurucamp | video | slides -
A Tale of Two Rubies
2013.06.20 – RuLu | video | slides -
How to Debug RubyMotion Apps
2013.03.28 – RubyMotion #inspect | video | slides -
How to Sneak Clojure Into Your Rails Shop
2013.03.20 – Clojure/West | video | slides -
There and Back Again -or- How I Set out to Benchmark an Algorithm and Ended Up Fixing Ruby
2012.11.02 – RubyConf | video | slides -
MacRuby for Fun and Profit
2011.12.13 – Boston Ruby Group | video | slides -
Keeping Ruby Reasonable
2011.09.30 – RubyConf | video | slides -
MacRuby: What is it and why should I care?
2011.06.14 – Boston Ruby Group | video | slides
These are just a couple of my favorite libraries and random side-projects...
ConcurrentCollectionOperations
This is a little library for Objective-C that I hacked on with a few friends. It provides extensions with helper methods for performing thread-safe concurrent map, filter, and other operations on the common Cocoa collection classes using Grand Central Dispatch under the hood.
A Y-Combinator in Objective-C
I went ahead and implemented the Y-Combinator using blocks in Objective-C. Why? As the great George Mallory once put it: "Because it's there!"
Scrabbler
I was learning Clojure with a group of co-workers, and this was one of the "homework" projects that we assigned ourselves. I also used it as a playground, of sorts, to experiment with Clojure's reducers when they were introduced
LogicBuzz
A different take on an old classic. This is an implementation of the traditional
"FizzBuzz" problem using Clojure's core.logic library. It started as a
just-for-fun project, but I ended up learning quite a lot about
core.logic along the way.
You can find more of my code on GitHub.
Ph.D. Preliminary Exam
This is the paper I prepared as part of my Ph.D. preliminary examination. The topic is "The Importance of Side-Chain Entropy in Protein Folding"... I know, riveting stuff, right? If you're the sort of person that likes this kind of stuff, you can also get the LaTeX source for the paper here. I've released it all under a CC BY-NC license.
Ph.D. Thesis Dissertation
This is the full text of my Ph.D. Thesis Dissertation entitled "A Model for the Evolution of Nucleotide Polymerase Directionality". If you don't feel like slogging through a full thesis, you can also check out the slightly shorter version that I published as a paper in PLoS One. The LaTeX source is also available here and is also licensed under a CC BY-NC license.
Evolver
This is the "toy model" (that's a technical term) that I constructed and studied as the bulk of my Ph.D. Thesis work. It was originally written in Ruby (and the "master" branch represents the final version used for all of the work presented in my dissertation), but I've also begun experimenting with re-implementing it in other languages.