Numderline: Grouping digits using OpenType shaping

I recently worked on a fun side project to make a font that used font shaping trickery to make it easier to read large numbers by underlining alternating digit groups or inserting fake commas.

I wrote about it on the Jane Street tech blog since I started work there recently and I came up with the idea to help me visually parse tables of latency numbers for my job.

You can read the post here: https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere/

You can also check out the font demo and download site and the Github repo for the font patcher.

There’s one other large public technical document I’ve written off of my own site that I might as well link here as well, which is my documentation of how the Xi text editor’s CRDT works. Although it’s written more as documentation than as a generally accessible blog post, you may still find it interesting, it has lots of diagrams. You can read it here