I’m not sure anything of import happened on Monday. I mean, OK, work was good. I like my job.
I have been on this program of studying core Computer Science concepts via online courses from [coincidentally] Ivy League schools, specifically the lecture videos, and I’m discovering a few things, rather belatedly.
For example, there’s definitely something to the notion that learning [for me] is accentuated by hearing something explained, seeing it (on a lecture slide) and writing it (in my notes), all at more or less the same time.
This is all in service of my taking over a lot of the technical interviewing duties at my job. I have the knowledge, but being self-taught, I have always lacked some of the vocabulary, so I’m filling that in now.
As a self-taught programmer, I generally learned new concepts by first bumbling into a project that I wanted to do & for which I lacked the skills, and then picking up the skills along the way. What that has meant, I’m finding out, is that I learned a lot about system architectures comparatively early in my “career” as a programmer, since I started in on real-world projects more or less from the very beginning.
So, for anyone reading this who is a CS student or professor: Tackle real-world projects sooner! Don’t wait until upper-level classes.
Tonight, Tuesday, we watched this show on PBS wherein Henry Louis Gates Jr. researched and explained the genealogies of Tina Fey, David Sedaris and George Stephanopoulos. You’d think that would be kind of rad, right? Well, no. Although it featured many kind of awkward moments in which HLG revealed some mildly interesting genealogical fact to one of the three & they had to figure out how to react to it, on camera.
But mostly it was a reminder that PBS exists solely to entertain shut-ins and other people with weak constitutions, and with the exception of independently-made documentaries that it picks up for distribution, it should probably just be left to die.