What's on your learning list?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity

A book that's really changing how I'm thinking. It starts by explaining how science makes progress. Defining a good theory as one that has explanatory power. A good theory explains stuff well.

Then proceeds to apply explanations. How to understand Physics from this frame of mind. How other approaches to epistemology (what we can know) works. What problems they face. What kind of errors other ways of thinking can lead to.

This is the best book I've read about what we can know, and it applies so generally to things I'm interested in. How can I know what I know. What about my team at work, what do we know. How should we communicate. About the products we're developing. How are they valuable? How can we know that it's valuable?

It's especially impressive how Deutsch navigates up and down the ladder of abstraction. Really general concept - then a really crisp example of how it applies exactly to an example.

I've been reading and re-reading this on and off for half a year. It's hard, but I'm learning a lot. Currently half way through the book.

In progress:

- The Rust Programming Language (book)

- Programming Rust (book)

(I'm going over them in parallel)

To do:

- The Elements of Computing Systems (book & course)

- High Performance Browser Networking (book)

- REST API Design Rulebook (book)

- Network Programming with Go (book)

- MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems (course)

- a bunch of docs and youtube tutorials on things I want some exposure to without going too deep (React, Django, FastAPI, Kubernetes)

- The System Design Interview (book)

- Grokking the System Design Interview (book)

- more Leetcode

For context I'm a data scientist who wants to switch to SWE at some point.

Working my way through this: https://teachyourselfcs.com/ - I'm almost half way through it. Then, I plan on completing this: https://fullstackopen.com/en/

- Spanish (I'm halfway decent but still struggle especially with production and spoken comprehension)

- Japanese (I'm still rather bad, although I know a fair bit of Kanji, vocab and grammar by now)

- Mathematical Logic (very vast topic)

- Programming Language theory, Type theory, better understanding of functional programming language concepts, etc. I'd like, for example, to be able to be productive in Haskell.

- Distributed systems. I'm really bad at thinking about distributed computing (although I suspect that even most people who work on distributed systems are), so I'd like to improve. I'm currently reading "The Art of Immutable Architecture" which, maybe unexpectedly, is mostly about how immutability helps with distributed computing. It's definitely idiosyncratic though, so I'll also need to read some other stuff. I've had my eyes on "designing data-intensive applications" for a while now. I'd also like to learn some Erlang/Elixir at some point.

- History. I'm really interested in history and enjoy good podcasts, audiobooks etc. about it. Currently on the Russian Revolution and also listening to a lecture series on the middle ages.

Reading and working my way through "Elements of ML Programming" (ML97 Edition). One of the many programming books I have, that I still want to get through. Slowly getting more productive using Standard ML. Once I have good understanding of all the language features, I will probably switch to "Purely Functional Data Structures" and understand its code, which will help me, when I want to write in functional style in other languages and want to avoid any unnecessarily badly chosen data structure, while also avoiding mutation, where it makes sense.

As a former vehement atheist, learning more about Christianity. It’s a daily process.

Learn all the basic paradigms of programming languages. Next on the list: Prolog, Haskell, Smalltalk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Programming_paradigms.svg

Learning quantum computing algorithms is on my list as well.

Playing the guitar! Numerous failed attempts over the last 15 years. My current approach is to just pick up a guitar and "play" without tabs or notes, basically just making sounds I like.

Immediate:

- Introduction To Graph Theory

- The design of approximation algorithms

- Introduction To Topology

- A book of abstract algebra

---

Long Term:

- GEB

- Linear and Geometric Algebra + Linear and Geometric Calculus

- Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics and Gauges

- Elements of functional analysis

- Cracking the coding interview

- Pattern Matching and Machine Learning

- Elements of Statistical Learning

- Probabilistic Machine Learning

And the list never ends.

Finally memorizing the Beethoven "Les Adieux" Sonata. It's an interesting work, fairly late opus. The three movements are labeled - by the composer - "Goodbye", "Absence", "Return". It seems like a metaphor for the pandemic, so it bubbled to the top of my queue. It's also fascinating because it seems to sit at the crossroads of Classical style and the Romantic movement. It was rare for classical era composers to tell the player/listener what emotion a piece was to evoke.

Languages to get a better handle on:

Swift - I transitioned out of macOS and iOS development when Obj-C was sunsetting, so that wave swept by me.

Rust

Learn Ukrainian - I'm a native English-speaker and C1/C2 in Russian, but am completely stumped by Ukrainian - like "you sound like you're speaking something I should understand, but..."

Improvising three dimensional or at least memorable characters as a GM in tabletop role playing games.

Giving characters over-the-top traits is a good start, but so much to learn about making them stand out in the players’ memories / making them more than tools of acquiring things to do for the players.

- APL. Trying to finally complete everything in Mastering Dyalog APL [1]. It's a long book.

- Complicated regular expressions

- Urdu

- Thomas Asbridge's The Crusades [2]

[1] https://www.dyalog.com/uploads/documents/MasteringDyalogAPL....

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Authoritative-History-Holy-L...

I'm currently interested in learning more about preference revision algorithms and formal properties of preference revision for my work in formal philosophy. I've read some of Grüne-Yanoff & Hansson (eds.) Preference Change, Springer 2009, but I'm looking for something more recent and in-depth. 5Just in case someone has a reference to share, I'd be grateful.

Computing skills :

- Solidify my overall programming skills. I'm still light on a lot of OOP concepts and on some data structures. On one hand I've never really taken to OOP, on the other I just don't program enough that concepts are really internalized.

- Get decent at the Go language. Nothing fancy, I just want to do some concurrency and message passing without getting my foot stuck in the carpet.

- Getting a better instinct for log aggregation/monitoring and process tracing. Dtrace has been on my list for at least a decade.

Other intellectual pursuits :

- I'd like to brush off my Latin and Ancient Greek. I honestly feel I should be able to speak Latin within a few months. But getting a sense for good Latin and appropriate style would take a few years.

- I want to pick up German in the near future.

- I want to go back to university part time (which you can do where I'm from) and finish a history degree. I love computing, but I love history more.

I want to learn how to sew a bra! It's actually quite difficult especially compared to other clothing.

Actively:

- Learning guitar via https://www.justinguitar.com/

- Learning Spanish via duolingo

- Learning Kotlin via "Atomic Kotlin"

Why guitar? Purely for myself. I'd learned some when I was a teen but my evangelical Protestant parents only wanted me to play "for the glory of God" and so I couldn't play "secular" songs. Now I'm grown and finally have enough time and disposable income to pick it up again.

Why Spanish? I'm latino, but parents never learned Spanish b/c of generational assimilation (having any accent was "bad") and I want to learn.

Why Kotlin? Java has been my primary language for the 10 years of my career and is the #1 language at my company. (We/I also use Objective-C, JS/TS, Perl, and Ruby.) However, I'm always bouncing between learning languages on the weekend, mostly as a hobby. I've tinkered with C C++ Swift Go Python CommonLisp Clojure and Rust. Each language, even though I might not have actually used, has taught me something new and for that alone it's been personally fulfilling to just get a cursory familiarity with the language. Picking up languages also makes it very easy to pick up the next and so on.

Kotlin itself seems like what I've been needing: a Java++. Something I can actually use at work, that won't take much to ramp up others, interacts easily with existing Java code/systems, and solves real problems that Java has. It's like Java with "Effective Java" built-in, as well as some great concepts from other languages (like coroutines from Go).

Been working on "wax on, wax off"-style kicking the tires with Kotlin. Like setting up a web server stack on AWS with it (Spring + Thymeleaf + Elastic Beanstalk + CodePipelines).

Backlog:

- Going through Crafting Interpreters https://craftinginterpreters.com/ using Kotlin (instead of Java).

I just set up LSP[1] with Spacemacs[2].

Now on to getting SQLModel[3] going with GeoAlchemy2[4].

This is all for the school project. The day job is all about Terraform.

[1] https://langserver.org/

[2] https://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+tools/lsp/README.html

[3] https://sqlmodel.tiangolo.com/

[4] http://gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/index.html

I'm happy to say nothing at the moment. Summer's coming, why waste it learning.

After waiting for async in Django for the last 5 years (yes, I know about the 4.1 announcement, no, it’s not there yet) and a general dislike of DRF over a built in REST solution, I’ve started looking at Elixir and Phoenix on the backend.

I started practicing Game Development (again). I haven't done it since I finished my college degree, because I was never able to find a job in the area.

I started making one-game-a-month as a learning exercise to tinker with all the different aspects of developing a game: coding, modelling, making art, composing music and sound effects, and even writing a devlog.

I've been blogging the entire thing. My first one-game-a-month is at https://dudezord.github.io/projects/Gatekeeper, if you are curious.

This is not tech related but geopolitics.

A few years ago, YouTube introduced me to a man, Peter Zeihan. He focuses on geopolitics and the future of nations. I thought his presentations were informative yet I was skeptical. Always kept him and his predictions in the back of my mind.

Fast forward to now, covid and the Ukraine-Russia war. Now I can’t get enough of his words and thoughts

On my reading list, is his books.

- The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America

- Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

So far, his predictions have been accurate. And that scares me about the next few years

*edit for formatting

"lojban". I first read about it when it was still "Loglan". My human language learning skills have always been my weakest, but I still refuse to give up.

Navigation (compass, celestial), another spoken language, calculus refresher, photoshop, vegan cooking.

Trying to avoid learning more programming things as I am entirely burned out from that.

Learning to draw form and volume. My inability to do so frustrates me a lot. I'm hoping someday to be able to visualize pictures and structures in my mind.

Wet plate photography.

I’ve been focused on mechanical building the last 2 years. I learned Solidworks, Blender, 3d printing, cnc, and resin casting. Now I am taking woodshop, and trying to learn more about mechanism design. Learning more about materials is always ongoing in the background. My goal is to be able prototype whatever zainy physical product idea I might have quickly and at a high quality.

Guitar, particularly jazz using The Jazz Guitar Handbook by Rod Fogg. Great book to get into playing jazz feeling stuff. I have a fantasy to do trios/quartets, but not yet at a level to play with others. (looking for any books/advice for next step).

Korean, particularly the listening part. Listening and parsing at the same time is really tough. Does anyone recommend italki?

- Bash/awk

- PHP event loop to use it with AJAX/websockets to make browser games

- SQL. I know SQL but I feel I need a deeper knowledge

- Rust or Go

- Spoken English

I've been meaning to properly learn complex analysis. There's a whole wealth of what seem to be magic spells that are possible merely because of root(-1) or something.

There's also Clifford algebra, which turns geometry into algebraic statements.

Art. Painting, drawing, seeing. Bought an iPad Air and the Apple Pencil a week ago to use Procreate.

I like traditional media, but the setup is annoying and the canvases and papers and whatnot start to pile up.

Berkeley - CS 61A Spring 2021

Berkeley - CS 61B Spring 2021

Helsinki - Full Stack Open 2022

Some LeetCode here and there.

Learning more about how Hinduism explains the beginnings of the Universe and planetary systems. How it's linked with yoga and synchronization of chakras

Machine learning stuff. I never got around to that, because you ain't gonna need it, and I never did, but as a generalist it's a bind spot.

I’ve been reading Bob Nystrom’s Crafting Interpreters and learning about interpreters and compilers in general.

Russian and hopefully German, but to be honest I've been saying that to myself for the last ~10 years at least.

I am struggling with french for the longest time. Any recommendations on how to effectively learn new languages?

Looking to go beyond the basics in Docker and Kubernetes, and intending to start learning Next.js.

- Languages (Mandarin and Spanish). - Application programming - front end apps using React

I want to learn 3D CAD design. Planning on building a battlebot and my own laptop.

FP-TS. Been a struggle so far.

My list won't fit in the comment.

So basically my current project is to trim it down.

Concertina, subnets, synthesizer, solidity, rock climbing, italian.

Being a good person

Leetcode System Design Cinematography Story telling

H.264 currently. Next RTMP, followed by AV1

More compiler optimizations

Next.js, TypeScript, RxJS.

In progress:

* JavaScript

Todo:

* APL or J

* Lisp

* Forth

* Lua

Houdini.

learning to morse

I spend a lot of time commuting to and from work. This is a good thing; it means I'm not stuck in traffic, and it gives me time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. I love listening to anything that I can learn from, whether it's business-related or not.

I especially love learning about how other people have succeeded in their careers, because I believe that there's something valuable to be learned from everyone's experience. I also just love hearing about what other people are passionate about!

Right now, my learning list is focused on books for women in business. Some of my favorites? The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.

reactive java, currently quarkus but their guides are awful.

I'm a Go backend Vue frontend guy currently. But I'm eyeballing Java and eventually Kotlin because while the Go language is regulated the ecosystem isn't. And even if performance and resource usage is worse than Go it's still good enough. So I'm trying to see if I can have my cake and eat it too, aka have grpc, RESTful API and reactivity and oidc protected endpoints and how that works with Vue, Flutter or Angular. Maybe eventually even write native Android mobile apps since they're Java also.

But Java is very closed off and seemingly elitist world compared to Go. Only few information outlets exist and the articles are usually incomplete.

I'm observing a decline in Go, many abandoned packages and some of the brains that were what's considered core packages have move away from Go. Gin for instance has a contrib sessions package but it's unmaintained and only select PRs are accepted. Sessions via redis aren't working anymore but since some packages depend on the exact package name of gin contrib sessions one would have to fork and fix both packages. I'm tried of this neglect and want an ecosystem that has not many but high quality packages. I'm also tired of working with half-assed packages like ent.

I feel like Java is where the professionals work and Go at first was full of very smart enthusiasts but now isn't anymore. They've moved to Rust as the next big thing and once they're done there they'll move to the next big thing. But Java albeit ugly and "ugh" is still there and it's used and expanded according to needs. The core is always hibernate and it has a long business history.

I've tried getting into Rust time and again but that ecosystem is even more desolate and the language just doesn't resonate with me.

The downside, JVM is swiss cheese security. If someone really wants to get at you they will.