I enjoy writing Friday posts since it lets me recap the week, plus having the weekend to mull things over.
In Week 1 of RC, I felt a little down thinking how next year it’ll be 10 years since my first pull request. Over the weekend I spent a bit of time looking through Eli Bendersky’s blog. I believe I first came across his blog when going through SICP, and later discovered he also had posts on implementing Raft.
What I hadn’t realized was that he started in blogging in 2003! This got me looking up Patrick McKenzie’s blog (aka patio11), who started his blog in 2006. OK so if people I admire for their technical writing started way back, then maybe I’m on the right track.
In any case, it’s a reminder to focus on the process, not the outcome.
Reading through blog posts also made me think about how blogs are the more fun read because you feel you’re learning a lot. What’s probably happening is you’re trading off depth for breadth. Perhaps this is why I have a tendency to go deep when there’s an external source of discipline, like a boss or course instructor.
Maybe it’s time to build that volitional muscle to go deep.
Going back to Eli, he didn’t just do SICP for a week. He spent close to a year working through the whole book, completing 94% of the 356 exercises. He also wrote ~66k words across 52 blog posts. That’s real volitional muscle.
It's a great blog - I looked it up over the weekend to read up on functors in Haskell. I then found a post on Hindley-Milner. I also discovered a post discussing left vs right folds, which goes into it in quite a bit more detail than mine…
Process. Not outcome.
It’s half way through my RC half batch. My plans for the remaining 3 weeks: chat more, pair more, write more. I would actually like to spend a bit of time going through Andrej Karpathy videos, and play around with AI-assisted coding. Let’s be a bit more ambitious, here we go.
Week 4 - Idris, CIS 194 Week 10 (functors)
Week 5 - Prolog, CIS 194 Week 11 (applicative functors)
Week 6 - parser combinators, CIS 194 Week 12 (monads)
Building that volitional muscle to go deep will have to wait.