
Ask HN: What are you learning? - blululu
What are you learning right now? My last side project was recently derailed and I am curious to hear what other people are spending their time studying&#x2F;learning about.
======
Twisol
I'm working through Aluffi's _Algebra: Chapter Zero_ , which covers abstract
algebra (groups, fields, vector spaces, etc.) with category theoretic
foundations. I took undergraduate algebra several years ago, and I'm really
interested in category theory from a compositionality perspective, so this is
a good opportunity to brush up on both topics.

Aluffi is really well-written. It assumes some degree of mathematical maturity
(so it's well-positioned for a second pass of the material), but has a
generally conversational tone without being imprecise. The exercises are
excellent, too, if occasionally difficult using only the machinery introduced
up to that point. (Again, well-suited to readers taking a second pass at
algebra.)

Why am I doing this? Leonard Susskind puts it well in this video [1]. To put
it in my own words: our senses evolved for the physical world around us, and
some of the most technical activities we do today are wildly underserved by
our natural senses. That's why we build things like microscopes and telescopes
and whatnot -- to extend our senses into new domains. Mathematical intuition
is almost another sense in its own right: you gain the ability to perceive
abstractions and relationships in ways that are just not well-described by
sight or touch. I both enjoy this sense and find it valuable, so of course I'm
going to continue honing it :)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bgZmBAnhdg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bgZmBAnhdg)

~~~
mjfl
You know something? I know a little abstract algebra: groups, subgroups,
quotient groups, and the relvent theorems behind them. It's been
disappointingly useless to me though. Maybe someday I will take the quotient
group of two matrix groups... I'm not sure though.

~~~
Twisol
I certainly haven't applied any of those examples either. ^_^ Abstract
algebra, topology, etc. are all studies of problems _that already have mental
frameworks_. People already did an incredible amount of legwork building the
apparati for understanding these fields (no pun intended). The value of
learning these frameworks, if you're not going to work in those fields
directly, is to understand _how to build your own framework_.

What kind of tools are in your toolbox for breaking problems down? Where is my
problem different from others, and where is my problem fundamentally the same?
How can we isolate these parts and handle them on their own terms? This is
fundamentally mathematics, however it's ultimately expressed.

Here's a small selection of those ideas I've picked up from mathematics that
have absolutely paid dividends in my day-to-day:

* The idea of a "homomorphism", a structure-perserving map between two different domains of discourse. The more I learn about category theory, the more I realize that homomorphisms are conceptually everywhere in software. The more I learn about domain-driven design, the more I realize the role functors (a particular kind of homomorphism) really play in software design.

* The idea of a "fixed point", for limiting behavior of processes. Fixed points are especially pleasant in domains where processes have some sense in which they "grow monotonically". When I can model a system as a series of operations that "add knowledge" and don't invalidate prior results, I know I have a wealth of analytical tools at my disposal.

* The idea of products (pairing) and sums (choice) in type theory, for modeling interactions between components. I feel like I'm in a straitjacket when using a language without sum types; I have to encode what I really mean using tools that don't let me get there directly.

------
yoshyosh
I'm learning how to make tacos starting with the tortilla. I'm originally from
San Diego and have always missed Mexican food whenever I moved abroad. On a
recent trip back to San Diego, I went to over a dozen Mexican shops to find
particular flours to create tortillas from. I also went to Mexico twice just
to find a specific brand of soft wheat flour. In total I think I experimented
with atleast 5-6 different flours thus far. Since then I've made over 150
tortillas, learning things like the importance of the ratio of
fat/water/flour, the proper heat, feel, and cook time. Rolling it with flour
and without, hand patting vs mechanical tortilla presses. Simple mistakes are
like the difference between making a cracker and a tortilla. There's also
things like the elasticity of the dough the longer it sits so things like
heated tortilla presses become important to help it keep its shape, since the
heat slightly cooks the tortilla as it's being pressed into shape. Compared to
pure mechanical ones where the tortilla will retract back due to no heat
forcing it to sit in place. I'm still hoping to invest in a heated press once
I return to the States since I can't find them in Amsterdam.

Overall I'm enjoying the craft of it all and will be soon moving towards
learning the details that go into making sauces and carne asada.

~~~
mikorym
One trick for those that are not as advanced as you are: For whatever wheat
you are using, add boiling water instead of cool water.

I've found this trick worked (a few years ago now) for a couple of trials
where I wanted to use just flour and water. I think the boiling water makes
the flour more elastic.

~~~
wigl
Hot water encourages hydration of the flour and gluten development, resulting
in a more elastic/homogeneous dough. IMHO, the hottest water from the tap
should be good enough for that purpose.

~~~
munificent
True, but hot tap water doesn't always taste very good. If you've ever had
seen the inside of a water heater, you will never want to consume hot water
again. It's often full of rust and scale.

~~~
wigl
You and the other commenter are correct. Just meant that temp ~120F as a
reference. Have lived in a calcite water area, no fun.

------
simonsarris
I've been clearing land all day and bought 50lbs of buckwheat. I intend to try
sowing/harvesting by hand. I will use this mostly for breads and pastries.
This is something of an experiment.

Building skills, I'm almost finished a chicken coop. I made a dry stone arch
bridge but it failed because the frame sank, I will try again. I am learning
carving to make wooden animal toys for my child, who will be born in July (I
have made a bear and a fox, soon an elephant, but they still need to be
sanded). I would like to learn timber framing and make a small cabin on the
land but it may be too expensive, now.

I'm trying to make an animated village for my site background with HTML
Canvas, and originally I was making it procedurally, but its too ugly, so I
will have to learn some digital illustration until it's beautiful.

~~~
CalRobert
If you have any pictures available (especially of this bridge) I'd be curious
to see.

Are you tilling? Doing raised beds? We're planting a bit this year and dealing
with weeds, etc. has been a hassle (also, most of the no-dig crowd seem to
basically advocate using many tons of compost, which is great but not
something you can assume a steady supply of)

~~~
simonsarris
There are lots of photos in this thread for the stone:
[https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1234186085200207872?s...](https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1234186085200207872?s=19p)

We're making semi raised beds up the hill:
[https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1246544902193909769?s...](https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1246544902193909769?s=19)

With house compost and composted manure from a local farmer. The lower garden
is mostly no till with added compost. We're not really sure what we're doing!
So I can't really give advice.

I usually document what I'm working on on Twitter as a micro blog

~~~
japhyr
I grew up in Nashua, and when I looked at your posts about restoring your home
it made me nostalgic for New Hampshire. I live in Alaska now and hope to spend
the rest of my life here, but NH has the feeling of home that you can only get
from having a childhood there. I found your posts a while back, and I always
enjoy looking at what you've been up to when I haven't seen it for a while.

I used to run and bike past so many houses that look like this, and some part
of me always wanted to do what you're doing. So thank you for sharing your
journey!

~~~
simonsarris
Ah I grew up in Nashua too, at 37 Orange street, if you've ever seen the house
(An 1840's house, just at the start of the downtown historic district)

~~~
japhyr
Here's how I tell people how my experience of Nashua has changed: "When I was
young, we used to tell people how to get to our house by saying at one point,
'Turn right where the cows are. You'll go over an old stone bridge and then
through some narrow curves on a few hills. Then turn right at..."

Then it turned into "Turn right where the cows used to be."

Then it became "Turn right at the ____ subdivision."

When I was young I did a lot of bicycling and running. In early high school
(1980s) a friend and I used to ride our bikes as far as we could in the
morning, and then try to find our way back without asking for directions. We
found all kinds of old back roads and small cemeteries and old stone walls and
other remnants of old New England. Now when I go back and go for a run or a
drive it's endless subdivisions. I don't resent that at all, I know things
grow and change. But it's certainly part of why I don't miss Nashua much
except for nostalgia.

~~~
simonsarris
That's funny. I was born in 1988, so that world was gone by the time I got
here. And even then, when I was a kid there were abandoned buildings to
explore like the old tannery, and those are demolished now.

For all the changes they can't get the downtown to "work" and they are really,
really bad at trying. I tried too: the mayor appointed me to the downtown
improvement committee where I got to watch nothing happen first hand.

~~~
japhyr
I'm sorry to hear that. From a distance, it seemed like there was some
interesting revitalization work going on in the downtown area. I remember
going to a barbershop off Main Street as a kid with my dad every couple of
weeks. Back then it was a classic old downtown, with shoe stores and shirt
stores and barbershops and hardware stores and all that.

------
shivekkhurana
I have lost my contract as a developer and am helping a non-profit [1]
streamline their operations. The organization aims to provide food and heath
kits to the marginalized. We have already distributed over 600 kits and are on
track to reach a 1000 in this week. Each kit is designed to support a family
of 4 for 1 month.

I was introduced to them by a friend who was helping them build an open
platform [2], open in the sense that all processes, donations, procurement and
guides are public.

Although my core competency is building and managing Saas, I took up the task
of setting up their operations. I find a striking similarity b/w managing Saas
and not-for-profit distribution.

We are relying heavily on Airtable.

Despite of being jobless, I feel less worried. The situation on ground is much
worse than mine.

\--- [1] [https://karuna2020.org](https://karuna2020.org) [2] [https://open-
data.karuna2020.org](https://open-data.karuna2020.org)

~~~
david_w
Each kit is designed to support a family of 4 for 1 month.

That's some freaking "kit" !!!

~~~
shivekkhurana
For the curious, we also published how we assemble these kits:
[https://karuna2020.org/guides/ration-and-safety-kit-
assembly...](https://karuna2020.org/guides/ration-and-safety-kit-assembly/)

------
chairfield
I'm learning how to level up my more fundamental life skills: nutrition,
exercise, and character. Character I'm learning through the study of _The 7
Habits of Highly Effective People_ which I'm working through with a friend.
For exercise, I'm enjoying learning a safe kettlebell program with the book
_Simple and Sinister_. With nutrition, I'm just trying to cook/prepare all my
own meals while keeping the ingredients healthy.

I've spent so much time studying skills more directly related to my work as a
software engineer, or hobbies like photography, that this shift is both
challenging and refreshing. I think it'll make a huge difference in the long
run.

~~~
Kezzo
For nutrition and diet I can highly recommend "How Not To Die" by Dr. Michael
Gregger: [https://nutritionfacts.org/book/](https://nutritionfacts.org/book/)

~~~
Amesharea
Isn't he completely anti-meat / pro-vegan? His research is cherry picked to a
large part and he usually cites epidemiological studies. At least he did when
I got into nutrition.

Reading multiple books and doing research yourself is to recommend, at least
there's one book with a whole website about the research used in each topic.
\---> Boundless by Ben Greenfield.

~~~
rb666
Both "How not to Die" and "How not to Diet" contain hundreds and even into the
thousands of references. All meticulously fact-checked by a team of
researchers.

If all the research points to "meat" being problematic, wouldn't a truthful
book be considered "anti-meat"? I am a meat lover myself, but Greger seems to
follow the scientific process to the letter.

~~~
JanSt
Quoting a lot of studies makes a great impression, but it's only worth it if
you're not cherry-picking. Have you read the actual studies he's quoting? I
did. Well, I read the first 50 or so. More times than not, they did not give
what he says or he is interpreting the result so it matches what he likes them
to say. Many are done badly. Many studies are done by hardcore vegans or
animal right activists. He quotes the same studies multiple times, adding
another references each time he quotes it again (making a great impression!).

A vegetarian diet may be the healthiest there is - I don't know. But Greger is
biased for sure.

------
mikro
I am learning game development in Godot, specifically with the intention of
making an Oculus Quest VR game. I just finished the initial tutorial
yesterday:
[https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.2/getting_started/step_by_...](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.2/getting_started/step_by_step/your_first_game.html)

Alongside that, I am also watching Disney's Imagineering-in-a-Box, which
describes how they develop lands and rides for their theme parks:
[https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2020/03/enjoy-a-
one-o...](https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2020/03/enjoy-a-one-of-a-
kind-learning-experience-from-disney-imagineers/)

I recently finished Stanford's CS231N Computer Vision course from 2017
(watching YouTube + 3 Jupyter Notebook assignments). Also highly recommended.
[http://cs231n.stanford.edu/syllabus.html](http://cs231n.stanford.edu/syllabus.html)

~~~
thatwhinyboi
I'm learning Godot too. Although, my pace of learning is very slow, since I am
also working from home. So I mostly learn on weekends or sometimes, for an
hour at the end of the day. I started from this link:
[http://www.alexhoratio.co.uk/search/label/gitting%20gud%20at...](http://www.alexhoratio.co.uk/search/label/gitting%20gud%20at%20godot)
These look good too:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/an0iq5/godot_tutoria...](https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/an0iq5/godot_tutorials_list_of_video_and_written/)

~~~
bee123
thank you for these links, its really helpful bro

------
nicolashahn
Stanford's CS143 Compilers course:
[https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:StanfordOnline+SOE...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:StanfordOnline+SOE.YCSCS1+1T2020/course/)

I've always been interested in making things that make other things, and
compilers definitely fall into that category.

In the middle of the second assignment, the parser. It's a lot to consume, but
I feel like the theory isn't particularly difficult, about half my learning
has been getting to know the tools (so far: flex, bison). I've also spent an
annoying amount of time on updating and configuring the VM, I guess that's a
bonus lesson in Linux sysadmin-ing. It's also my first experience with C++,
which seems useful to know.

I also started this course on web security:
[https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/](https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/).
The first assignment was a lot of fun, the material is fresh, and it
definitely seems like very useful information for anyone in the web stack.

I'm also learning a bunch of new cooking recipes, but who isn't nowadays.

~~~
HanQi
Thanks for your recommendation !I am pretty interested in web security partly
because I want to start my own start up in two years, and I want to make sure
my customer's data is safe. I am also interested in compilers but just can't
bear C++, so I plan to take this course
:[https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2](https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2).
It doesn't limit languages you can use .So I plan to write the compiler by
Racket(which can also sharpen my functional programming skill).

------
enhdless
I'm trying to learn to draw.

I feel comfortable enough with my technical skills where I feel like I can
pick up a new language or framework with relative ease, so I want to switch
gears and improve my drawing and visual communication skills. I believe that
any project can benefit from a compelling visual component.

For now, I've been trying to start slow and just have fun; for example,
telling myself to do three quick sketches of my dog every day and keep up a
habit. Eventually I'd like to follow some more structured exercises and
resources, like [https://drawabox.com/](https://drawabox.com/).

~~~
Areading314
Learning to draw is something anyone can do and is incredibly rewarding. It
activates a huge part of your brain (visual) that starts firing when you see
all sorts of scenes, faces, patterns, colors in real life. Try the book
"drawing on the right side of the brain". Another good one is the Bargue
sculpture drawing course.

~~~
throw1234651234
Yea, right, until you try to get perspective correct.

If you understand this, you are a genius:

[https://crafts.stackexchange.com/questions/3316/how-to-
measu...](https://crafts.stackexchange.com/questions/3316/how-to-measure-the-
distance-to-horizon-line-one-point-perspective)

~~~
Areading314
Don't worry about perspective drawing. This is a much more technical subject,
separate from the skill of "drawing what you see".

~~~
throw1234651234
I want to be able to draw from imagination. Drawing from real life has no
appeal to me (though drawing realistically does).

~~~
tingol
Any artist that draws from imagination will tell you to draw from real life.
Once you get that down it's waaaay easier since you have strong foundations in
figures, perspective and forms. No one just started drawing from imagination.

------
platelminto
I'm studying _Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists_ [1] - until I found
this book, I thought anything covering quantum would be too physics oriented.
As the title implies, this book is nothing like that, covering all the
mathematics needed (matrices and relevant operations) to then understand
various topics within QC ranging from Algorithms to Programming Languages to
Cryptography, all in largely self-contained chapters.

I'm currently working through the Algorithms chapter, which builds up from
Deutsch's Algorithm [2] all the way to Shor's Factoring Algorithm [3], but I
will definitely end up going through most of the chapters.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-Computer-
Scientists...](https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-Computer-Scientists-
Yanofsky/dp/0521879965)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch%E2%80%93Jozsa_algorith...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch%E2%80%93Jozsa_algorithm#Deutsch's_algorithm)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm)

------
spurgu
Morse code. Started today by learning the alphabet in half an hour using a
Google creative project[0] and quickly realized the challenge will be thinking
in the sound/rhythm of the letters (instantly hearing/deciphering them) so I
found a video[1] and then watched another video[1] which confirmed my hunch
that it's better to focus on the sound than the notation.

Now I have GBoard w/ morse as my default keyboard on the mobile. Works well
enough for short messages (and typing in URLs with autocomplete).

Edit: And I've been learning Spanish for months already so that's still
active.

[0] [https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/](https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_qQZ92onhU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_qQZ92onhU)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8tPkb98Fkk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8tPkb98Fkk)

~~~
IggleSniggle
omg. This was AWESOME! Thank you for sharing this. I just finished that
tutorial and it was great. Very well done- Never done Morse before and 1.5 hrs
later Im writing this comment (including punctuation...very slowly...but
musically) via morse!

I think my favorite moments were learning that v uses the motif from
Beethovens Vth and `!` = Candy+mustache

~~~
spurgu
> v uses the motif from Beethovens Vth

Brilliant observation, this one will be impossible to forget now!

edit: And I'm glad you found it useful! I've always wanted to learn Morse but
never found the time/inspiration before that little learning app, which made
the dive in so easy!

------
gentryb
I've learned a ton about the homeless population and shelter process.

I've been a volunteer leading health assessments and triage (via volunteer
Telehealth nurses) at our local men's shelter. The shelter has even
experienced a complete move in the last week.

A few huge points, however:

* Homelessness isn't always a choice - and especially in this situation it's causing panic.

* Our shelter system needs much greater support, and many organizations need better communication and integration.

* Paper is alive and well some places, others are quite a bit better technologically. There is much room for process improvement.

* While I am selfishly getting out of my own house and interacting with people, none of them are in anywhere near an ideal situation - and it's affected my mental health somewhat. I'm grateful for personal protective equipment, but reuse does concern me.

So much more I could go on about, but I can say during this period I've
learned a ton more about homelessness, the process, and have kept people from
entering the shelter thanks to our fantastic volunteer nurses who need to
practice in a limited capacity for COVID-19 screening.

Volunteering is also something that has turned into quite a calling for me
right now as well.

~~~
toss1
>> I'm grateful for personal protective equipment, but reuse does concern me

To help with this, studies indicate that you can heat items in the oven at 70C
for 30 minutes for effective sterilization without compromising the masks.
More detail at [1]. My household is also using this technique on things like
incoming mail, etc.

Bravo on your work - stay safe!

[1]
[http://www.imcclinics.com/english/index.php/news/view?id=83](http://www.imcclinics.com/english/index.php/news/view?id=83)

------
narag
Music edition/production with Reaper:

[https://www.reaper.fm/](https://www.reaper.fm/)

They've been so kind to issue a temporary free license to help with the
isolation. Their license model is very liberal anyway, but the gesture was
well appreciated.

I own a Yamaha E363 keyboard and a Stratocaster, now I've bought a Behringer
U-Phoria UMC204HD soundcard and an Audio-Technica AT2020 mic to complete the
budget home studio. Amazon.es is working _faster_ actually. However I wish
they kept orders bundled, instead of delivering them apiece.

There are many videos linked from Reaper website, but as a Spanish speaker I
prefer this guy, that's absolutely great:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEkUr7EAx4LwIv2gp2pwvPQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEkUr7EAx4LwIv2gp2pwvPQ)

I'm also going to learn to airbrush. I've had the gear for some time, but now
I'm seriously putting the time.

~~~
kitotik
A very cool, overlooked, and timely feature of Reaper is NinJam which is a way
to “jam” with people remotely through a fixed time-delay.

It’s been around for at least 15 years, but looks like the author has recently
started updating the feature again. Check it out!

~~~
arbol
That's such a good idea! How are the latencies worked out?

~~~
boomlinde
The delay is extended to a musical unit, I think a full bar or a measure. So
the latency is "musical" but really high.

------
nojvek
How to raise a good human, be a good dad and husband.

Relationships take a lot of commitment and effort. It took me a while to learn
how to communicate effectively with my wife so we’re fighting problems and not
each other.

Babies really test your patience. They are hard to reason with so I have to
keep my emotions in check and always be calm even if she is throwing a massive
fit. But sometimes they really get your nerves when they cry non-stop for half
an hour.

~~~
w4tson
It’s been both great and terrible to be cooked up in a small flat with my wife
and child. I’m always happy to see comments like this. I wonder if there’s a
community for the M(o|u|a)ms/Dads of HN

Any tips for communications with partners?

~~~
liziwizi
most important is to come from a place of respect and to talk about the issue,
not about the person. it should be about solving the problem together. never
about pointing blame.

when i was still stuck in relationships that didn't work, most discussions
were always about "who did (or did not do) what and why that was terrible".
these days we talk about what problems we face, what we tried, how they didn't
work and ask each other advice on how to deal with the situation.

i had to learn to be more humble and own up to my faults (that was hard). i
also had to learn to reign in my temper when i was getting frustrated. (that
felt impossible, but turns out to be easy when the discussions are not
personally directed)

and another thing that has a huge impact on our communication: we validate,
compliment or appreciate each others efforts constantly. we talk more about
the good stuff than about the bad stuff, and that really makes a difference.

and lastly: allow each other personal space when needed

i know this is not really "new knowledge". every talk or tutorial about
communication will tell you similar things. but it is what works for us.

~~~
MikeTheGreat
First - this is an amazing comment! Solid, concise, and really highlights the
important stuff.

John Gottman has a number of books on this topic and I'd highly recommend
them.

~~~
thomk
Thank you for mentioning John Gottman this looks helpful.

------
mettamage
I'm learning pentesting for fun. I'm mainly active on hackthebox.eu. I might
get my OSCP one day, for fun as well. I do still think the certificate comes
in handy despite the fact that I'm applying for web developer positions at the
moment. I'm happy I'm learning this though, I'm already noticing that I
develop differently, because the little I've learned about pentesting taught
me that true cyber criminals are hungry to break into your systems, and they
only need one shot, one small misconfiguration and they're in. Or at least,
that's how it works on hackthebox ^^

I'm also doing some OSINT (open-source intelligence) by simply giving myself
assignments. The assignments on hackthebox.eu were not all that great and
OSINT is one of the few disciplines that you can do in the real world without
permission, since it's all about accessing public data.

I flip back and forth between the 2 disciplines. I don't know why it attracts
me. It just does. I also notice that learning this stuff is completely
different from programming. And to an extent it's one of the few ways that
gives me the feeling that I'm "living and moving around" in cyberspace as
opposed to "constructing" (i.e. programming) in cyberspace. I guess typing cd
and ls on a lot of Linux and Windows practice boxes give that effect. And the
cool thing is, you learn a lot quicker about all kinds of services. For
example, I never knew about rsyslog, logger or the mqtt protocol (Linux
boxes). I never knew about Kerberos, Active Directory and smb (Windows boxes).

I'm happy I did some master courses in cyber security beforehand. While I'm
really new to a lot of things, I've gained a lot of what psychologist call
crystalized intelligence in this area. So it's all quite easy(ish) to
understand. Things get harder when I have to reverse engineer binaries or
debug in x64 assembly. It's still doable though.

~~~
eqqn
I am also learning pentesting, for the cert and to have some methodology in my
job ( somewhere between devops/compliance/security). First week into PWK
course, I used hackthebox and thecybermentor's practical pentesting course to
build up confidence to attempt getting that long wanted OSCP title.

~~~
mettamage
Awesome!

I've heard that OSCP is a lot more CVE based than hackthebox. It apparently
also has a lot more rabbit holes compared to hackthebox. I haven't checked out
thecybermentor yet, but a friend of mine has and he seemed to like it as well.

~~~
ssklash
It is more about identifying CVEs and exploits than HTB is, but there is still
a good amount of finding misconfigurations, like HTB has. OSCP helps you build
a methodology and a mindset for pentesting, and finding CVEs with existing
exploits makes that a little easier than HTB, where you are not under time
pressure. HTB would be my goto to prep for OSCP, I wish I'd found it before.

------
strategarius
Currently I'm learning video editing on Davinci Resolve.

[https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/)

I collect examples of advanced C++. Noticed the lack of educational content at
this subject, and planning a short course, something like "Exceptional C++"
style, but on video.

In our distributed team we have a practice to make video presentations for
colleagues, so I have experience of delivering visual content to tech
audience. However, I see that particular course like a high-quality content,
with diagrams, animations etc.

That's how I found Davinci Resolve, and you know, it's fun to learn it (even
it crashes more than production-ready application supposed to). The only thing
that buzz me, is not to forget about the initial goal:)

~~~
Farbklex
Video editing is a very usefull skill. It's rewarding to be able to quickly
trim, stitch and edit some clips and maybe throw in some effects here and
there.

Davinci Resolve is a surprisingly good tool and for a non-professional it
would be my no. 1 recommendation.

------
dceddia
Building a guitar! It's my first attempt at building an instrument. It's going
well so far, mostly using threads from TDPRI as guidance and a body template
from there as well. I opted to buy a neck from Warmoth since building a neck
seemed especially intimidating and requires more special tools. Today I
finished soldering the electronics, bolted the neck on, strung it up and it
actually works! Now to take it apart and work on the finish... lots of sanding
ahead.

(I'm pretty sure it's uncommon to put the whole thing together before
finishing, and then take it all apart again, including the electronics... but
I wanted to know nothing would be terribly wrong before I spend hours more on
finishing!)

TDPRI's Tele Home Depot is a great source of info-
[https://www.tdpri.com/forums/tele-home-
depot.46/](https://www.tdpri.com/forums/tele-home-depot.46/)

My own build thread: [https://www.tdpri.com/threads/first-
build.1011061/](https://www.tdpri.com/threads/first-build.1011061/)

~~~
myguysi
That’s awesome! I did the same a couple of years ago (took about 1 year to
complete) and it’s one of the things I’m most proud of, so I hope it feels as
fulfilling for you too!

~~~
dceddia
Cool! Thanks! I'm most worried about the finishing part, honestly. What did
you end up doing for it?

I keep debating between whether to leave the wood visible (with Tru Oil or
wipe-on polyurethane), or paint it (lacquer, super labor intensive, slow,
expensive), or dye/stain it and use a clear finish on top of that.

~~~
myguysi
I ended up filling the grain with wood filler dyed black and make it pop and
then layered a few coats of trans-red from a spray can so you can still see
the grain. It’s not a glassy finish but that’s what I was going for and the
colour is amazing! I always wanted a red strat with a black pickguard and gold
hardware so I thought why not!

I’m personally a fan of leaving the wood visible but the best thing is you can
do whatever you want and it’ll be awesome because you made it.

------
ericax
World-building.

After reading about storytelling, I realized that I'm as fascinated to a well-
crafted world as good plots and characters.

There's not much to read about, as a fiction world can contain as much detail
as the real world. I'm spending time looking at the fiction worlds that I like
and taking them apart.

As an exercise, imagining places and races is also interesting. You'll be
amazed by the amount of details required to fill the gaps in order to "see"
something in your head.

~~~
christophergs
NK Jamisin (3 time Hugo winner) talks about world building as a technique.
It's something mentioned in this great video about why "The Expanse" is
awesome:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGIovBe7pL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGIovBe7pL8)

~~~
mkl
*Jemisin: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._K._Jemisin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._K._Jemisin)

Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row!

------
tomxor
... Don't laugh: C

I learnt programming mainly through various scripting languages, some of which
had some relatively simple visual output available, which I personally found
invaluable for learning and visualizing.

I realized that better visual output was the main thing holding me back from
doing more in C since there are so many options, often complex, involving much
boilerplate. So my mini project is essentially exploring the simplest, most
minimal possible ways of drawing pixels on the screen in Linux.

So far tried fbdev (but doesn't work well with X), now playing with XCB.

~~~
DizzyDoo
Out of interest, why would people laugh at someone learning C? I know plenty
of people using C in all manner of domains, choosing it over C++ or Rust for
fair and sensible reasons - I'm not a C person myself, but it certainly seems
extremely useful to have in the toolkit!

~~~
tomxor
I want to learn C not (only) because I think it's useful, but because I think
I might like it. I have a particular interpreted language that I like, enjoy
and know inside out, now I want to know a compiled one in a similar way.

To answer your question: I get the impression from various tech news on "hot
new languages" that C is the incumbent systems language that people put up
with but don't really love, and yet I want to try and love it. I've developed
a taste for minimalism, simplicity and a degree of brevity in programming, I
have a feeling I might find C more suited to me than C++, Rust, Go, Java etc
for this reason despite the lack of "modern" features.

~~~
juped
I love C. Lots of people do.

------
runetech
Clojure, Fulcro and Kafka Streams.

All 3 are a mind expansion coming from other tech. Cannot recommend them
enough :-)

[https://clojure.org/](https://clojure.org/)
[https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/](https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/)
[https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/streams/](https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/streams/)

~~~
gotts
I'm a big fan of the first two but why KS mentioned in this group of 3? What's
so special about it in this combo? Or is it unrelated?

------
naikus
Sketching on paper. There is a great free resource for learning how to sketch.

[https://drawabox.com/](https://drawabox.com/)

~~~
sh87
Had never heard of drawabox. Loved their description[0]. Resonated so deeply
with me.

> Drawabox's goal is to provide beginners with a strong foundation, and to
> equip them with the things a lot of other courses and tutorials tend to take
> for granted.

> It is not going to make you a professional on its own, but it will teach you
> how to practice, how to use the resources available to you on the internet,
> and equip you with the tools and skills you need to take advantage of them

[0]:[https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/1/whatis](https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/1/whatis)

------
metasaval
It's a basic one, but learning an instrument! Namely, the drums. I've tried
guitar and bass before, but neither stuck. I'd been thinking of getting a
e-drum kit for a while now, and the quarantine gave me a good excuse. I'm
loving it so far, just playing along to songs I like, but since I'm self-
learning I can already tell my technique and drum kit setup is off. I keep
having to adjust the drums, the snare especially, and haven't found the
optimal position for everything yet. But it's grabbed me more than any
instrument before, and I'm having a blast.

The kit I got for those curious: [https://www.guitarcenter.com/Alesis/Nitro-
Mesh-8-Piece-Elect...](https://www.guitarcenter.com/Alesis/Nitro-Mesh-8-Piece-
Electronic-Drum-Set.gc)

Throne: [https://www.guitarcenter.com/ROC-N-SOC/Nitro-Throne-
Tan-1500...](https://www.guitarcenter.com/ROC-N-SOC/Nitro-Throne-
Tan-1500000149907.gc?rNtt=roc-n-soc&index=1)

------
mildmelon
I've been learning Korean, I recently found out that it is a language that was
invented rather than evolving over time. It was created with the intention to
be easy to learn. The entire alphabet is 24 characters, whereas Japanese has
over 500 and Mandarin has a few thousand.

Each of the 24 characters follow very logical rules and build onto each other
to build "blocks" of syllables. Each block must start with a consonant in the
top-left, always followed by a vowel, and sometimes ends with a consonant. So
the block always reads left-right, top-bottom and must always contain at least
one consonant and vowel.

In addition, each syllable block has a phonetic sound. This means that it's
really easy to read and pronounce, since there are no silent letters, with the
one exception of single vowel syllable blocks. Which must start with a silent
ㅇ(ng), for example the character ㅣ(i). So following the rule of a syllable
block needing to start with a consonant you can't have a single ㅣ since it's a
vowel, so you need to use ㅇ as a placeholder, thus creating ㅇㅣ(i).

Now if you want to create a word, like "child". You can put together the
character ㅏ(a) and ㅣ(i). Since you can't have two vowels in the same block, we
must use two blocks to create the word. This gives us ㅇㅏㅇㅣ (a-i).

The vowels consist entirely of horizontal and vertical lines, with a dash or
double dash off to the left, right, top, or bottom. It's a very simple
alphabet and an extremely interesting language. If anyone want's to learn
more, feel free to checkout the Wiki page on Hangul for the full set of
vowels, consonants, and double consonants. It's often said you can learn the
Hangul alphabet in 90 minutes. If you want a solid intro course to Hangul,
checkout this video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5aobqyEaMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5aobqyEaMQ)

~~~
azepoi
The alphabet was created not the language itself. Hangul is indeed designed
for the Korean language, a natural language.

~~~
mildmelon
You are correct, my mistake. Thank you for the clarification.

------
straumat
I'm learning about trading bots. It allows me to learn new things about
software développement (réactive streams forum example), mathematics, machine
learning and deep learning

I made it as a side project : [https://github.com/cassandre-tech/cassandre-
trading-bot](https://github.com/cassandre-tech/cassandre-trading-bot)

And i am writing a guide about what i learned : [https://trading-
bot.cassandre.tech/](https://trading-bot.cassandre.tech/)

~~~
sfmau
This is incredible - Thanks for sharing. Kudos for using the latest goodies
provided in spring-boot.

I had an older version but wasn't using reactive. Definitely, this looks
promising.

~~~
straumat
Thanks a lot for your message :) I'm glad you like it.

------
baby
I'm writing a book at the moment[1], which means all my learning is focused on
the table of content I made up a year ago.

But if I had time on my hand I would learn about:

* Adobe after effect not to only to edit videos but to animate!

* Illustrator, because it's the basis of any graphics

* Blender, because I want to learn about 3D graphics and this seems to be the reference

* Unity, a gaming engine, because I've always wanted to make a FPS game

* Phaser, an HTML5 gaming engine, because I want to make a multiplayer game with websockets. I'm thinking of starting with an online board game though.

[1]: [https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-
cryptography?a_aid=...](https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-
cryptography?a_aid=Realworldcrypto)

~~~
tmaly
learning Adobe After Effects, Premier, and Animate are on my list. I use to
use Flash quite a bit back in 2002.

------
lostsoul8282
I've been dividing my life into different parts - fitness, technology, wisdom,
food and love.

Fitness, I cannot hit the gym anymore so at home I'm doing body weight
training goals. Current goal is 1k squats a day(done), 1k burpees day(70/day
right now, It's 1 week in so progress is very fast right now), and a
bodyweight program my gym is offering.

For tech, I'm learning machine learning applied to a environmental program I'm
trying to build which I'm passionate about.

Wisdom, this is subjective but I'm going back into old philosophy books. Just
finished some work by Stoics and will read the plague by Albert Camus.

food, Every other day I'm trying to learn how to cook something new. I tried
baking which is awesome, today I will try to make a chilli on a pot(never did
that before).

Love, this is the hardest but also the easiest in theory. I'm trying to
connect to the things that I love but because life got busy, I didn't connect
to as much. This included just having conversations with friends, training my
dog, loving how my body can do complex movements(squats/burpees), the beauty
of technology, or just observing nature.

~~~
hattori
First of all congrats of mental fortitude to do 1k squats/burpees. That's
quite insane. May I offer an opinion here - doing 1k body-weight squats is
like doing 'hello world' 1000 times and trying to progress in programming :)
Bigger ROI if you fill up a backpack with books and do 100 of them from
strength, time (and probably endurance) perspective.

------
StrauXX
Clojure! I played around with common lisp a bit a some months ago, though I
basically used none of the lisp specific features like macros. After reading a
few blog posts on functional programming and "the lisp way" I have decided to
buy a book on Clojure. My end goal (for now) is to build a basic website with
a backend.

~~~
gotts
Try out [https://github.com/fulcrologic/fulcro-
template](https://github.com/fulcrologic/fulcro-template) full stack Clojure
web app template powered by Fulcro.

~~~
iimblack
Fulcro is huge and might be a lot if you're just starting to learn Clojure
too. IMO Luminus is a pretty nice option that lets you start simple and add
more complicated pieces as you require.

------
msci100
I'm writing a movie script.

It's a horror movie about a guy who renovates foreclosed houses for banks. But
one of the houses he goes into has a ghost in it. He has to solve the mystery
of why the ghost is there before he can leave.

I call it: "Repossessed"

Working tagline: "This is for closure."

~~~
bluetwo
Glad to see you taking on a creative outlet. Hope you are able to get it done
before this is all lifted.

------
dorchadas
Right now, I'm learning math. I met a PhD via Discord who is giving me
problems to work and checking my solutions. It's been quite fun so far,
working on Real Analysis and Abstract Algebra.

I'm also doing baking; baked my first loaf of bread yesterday. Really
interested to learn (and eat!) more.

I'm tempted to pick up a cheap instrument and learn one as well, or delve back
into Python some more. Or drawing. My main issue is focusing now, sadly. Any
tips there would be appreciated.

~~~
behnamoh
I'm curious, how could someone find a PhD/researcher on Discord, esp. for this
kind of purpose?

~~~
dorchadas
I found them on /r/math, actually, but they linked me to Discord.

~~~
behnamoh
thanks!

------
agentultra
I've been working through the Abstract Algebra course at Harvard:
[http://matterhorn.dce.harvard.edu/engage/ui/index.html#/1999...](http://matterhorn.dce.harvard.edu/engage/ui/index.html#/1999/01/82345)
as well as Bartoz's Category Theory courses.

I've put that a temporary hold for the last couple of weeks to brush up on
algorithms; I'm working through some select chapters of Concrete Mathematics,
Programming in the 1990s, How to Solve It, and Algorithms. I find I'm not
satisfactory at solving leetcode-style problems in what industry considers a
sufficient amount of time so I'm working on improving my skills there.

And I'm making progress on my own side projects as well. I'm testing the
waters with trying to record my work on video to see if streaming might be a
thing I could do.

------
wasi0013
Exploring Elixir & Phoenix. Solved some AOC & exercism problems with it, and
wrote a BF compiler. So far, enjoying every bit of it. The language itself is
beautiful! Codes are available on my Github[1] account :).

[1] [https://github.com/wasi0013/](https://github.com/wasi0013/)

~~~
AlchemistCamp
What inspired the BF compiler project?

~~~
wasi0013
I thought it will be easy to implement and also a bit of nostalgia.

I was a 2nd/3rd semester CS student at that time when I saw BF code for the
first time on a Competitive programming platform named SPOJ[0]. Later, I found
it again on a code golfing website[1].

I thought it would be fun to learn as the language only had 8 commands! I
learned it and wrote a tutorial[2] on my native language for my best friend so
that we could have some fun together with it :D

[0] [http://spoj.com/](http://spoj.com/)

[1] [http://golf.shinh.org/](http://golf.shinh.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/wasi0013/Bangla-Brainfuck-
tutorial/blob/m...](https://github.com/wasi0013/Bangla-Brainfuck-
tutorial/blob/master/Bangla-Brainfuck-Tutorial.md)

------
c0deb0t
High school is out so I am learning SIMD instruction sets, like AVX2 and SSE,
and using these to speed up Hamming/Levenshtein distance calculations in Rust.
Preliminary testing shows a 20x speedup using vectorized SIMD operations! The
end goal is a full Rust library for edit distance routines.

Sneak peek of the code:
[https://twitter.com/daniel_c0deb0t/status/124224838155819008...](https://twitter.com/daniel_c0deb0t/status/1242248381558190080?s=20)

~~~
uoaei
You could also consider providing bioinformatics routines such as global and
local sequence alignment. Under the hood they're very similar algorithms.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_alignment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_alignment)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needleman%E2%80%93Wunsch_algor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needleman%E2%80%93Wunsch_algorithm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Waterman_algorit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Waterman_algorithm)

~~~
c0deb0t
Though I probably won't implement the different weighting schemes, I currently
have alignment traceback and searching (allow "free shifts" for the pattern
string) features.

~~~
mattclase
Here's another recent SIMD aligner if you're interested:

[https://github.com/langmead-lab/vargas](https://github.com/langmead-
lab/vargas)

~~~
c0deb0t
I took a look at the code, and read the paper. It seems that they directly
calculate the entire 2D DP array, but use SIMD to allow each cell to contain
multiple values, one for each query string. My approach uses anti-diagonals
instead, but it is fast for one vs one comparisons, instead of handling
multiple query strings.

Regardless, my goal was to learn some SIMD and Rust (first time for both), so
I did not read many background papers.

~~~
mattclase
One thing to keep in mind is for SIMD memory locality is very important; a
diagonal vector with a standard 2D DP grid is gonna lead to a lot of cache
misses. Just something else to learn about.

~~~
c0deb0t
Since I am storing the entire DP matrix as diagonal vectors that are
flattened, I don't think there will be many cache misses. Each diagonal only
depends on its previous two diagonals, and each diagonal is stored
contiguously in memory.

The problem with handling diagonals is that indexing cells and comparing
characters on the diagonal becomes complex. Dealing with this without many
branches (less branch mispredictions) is the hard part.

------
koeng
Prolog. I think that genetic logic can largely be expressed in Prolog to
enable doing some crazy stuff that hasn’t been explored yet. It’s crazy to me
that synthetic biology hasn’t really used logical programming yet for gene
design.

~~~
Twisol
Logic programming is badly underapplied in general, I think. Most of the
amazing work in this area never seems to have gotten far out of academia (if
at all) -- Prolog being the almost singular exception.

Would be awesome to see some motivating examples for this application. It
sounds really cool!

~~~
koeng
In synthetic biology, the application is super clear.

Let's say we want to make cocaine (or related compounds) in yeast
([https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11588-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11588-w)).
Well, we know the biosynthetic pathway to get to that molecule
([https://biocyc.org/META/new-
image?type=PATHWAY&object=PWY-58...](https://biocyc.org/META/new-
image?type=PATHWAY&object=PWY-5843)), and we know the biosynthetic pathways in
yeast that intersect with that pathway.

In the tropane paper, they express 15 new genes and did 7 disruptions.

There should be a way to declare "I want this end product" and a system
knowledgeable about the proteins associated with the reactions necessary to
get there should be able to fit the puzzle of "ok, if you express these
proteins you get that end product, and if you knock down these genes in the
organism it should increase your production".

This generalized system should be applicable to nearly any biosynthetic
pathway, and I think there is definitely a profitable niche at being good at
that.

------
melenaboija
Trying to improve some of my intuition in linear algebra, more specifically in
matrix decomposition and SVD.

[https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-065-matrix-
method...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-065-matrix-methods-in-
data-analysis-signal-processing-and-machine-learning-spring-2018/video-
lectures/lecture-6-singular-value-decomposition-svd/)

~~~
rassibassi
Had similar intentions half a year ago, it really clicked for me after
watching the linear dynamical systems lecture by Boyd. How rank of a matrix,
matrix norm and singular values relate was an eye opener. Thereafter it was
easy to connect singular values and the stability/robustness of a system
intuitively. Great teacher, I can only recommend :)

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL06960BA52D0DB32B](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL06960BA52D0DB32B)

------
ruslanuchan
I've been into literature and philosophy for some time now. I'm following the
"Masterpieces of World Literature" course [1] and have finished "Beyond Good
and Evil" last month, currently reading Kierkegaard's Either/Or.

Aside from that, I'm also participating in Leetcode 30 days of code challenge
[2]

[1] [https://www.edx.org/course/masterpieces-of-world-
literature](https://www.edx.org/course/masterpieces-of-world-literature) [2]
[https://leetcode.com/explore/featured/card/30-day-
leetcoding...](https://leetcode.com/explore/featured/card/30-day-leetcoding-
challenge/)

~~~
nequalstim
Same here :)

Just started reading

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-
Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell

It has a really nice narrative and tells the story of the aforementioned.
Kierkegaard also makes some occurrences.

~~~
stdlin
if you tend to like that book I would highly recommended Walter Kaufman's
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre and Goethe, Kant, and Hegel

~~~
david_w
Second this also. Also enjoyed Will To Power as a kind of well of "things well
said, which make you think, " even if they're not strictly correct.

Bertrand Russell wrote a lot of very accessible Western philosophy overview or
survey books which I found orienting:

[https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-history-of-western-
philosoph...](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-history-of-western-
philosophy_bertrand-russell/263257/)

and

[https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-problems-of-
philosophy_ber...](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-problems-of-
philosophy_bertrand-russell/286828/)

the former is online here:

[http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/History%20of%20Western...](http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/History%20of%20Western%20Philosophy.pdf)

About this one he said :(paraphrasing from memory now), "A big book is a big
evil. You may ask why then the author proposes to lay before you the present
work..."

He's a hoot.

------
HanQi
I am taking this course[1]: Programming Languages. It emphasizes on big ideas
behind languages and functional programming which is very interesting and
enlightening.You will implement a type checker and interpreter through this
course(I am struggling ML's pattern matching now but feel quite pleasant ).

[1][https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-
languages/](https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages/)

~~~
johndoe42377
One of the best courses ever.

~~~
guhsnamih
Yes, the only course I ever finished and finished wiser of the scores I must
have enrolled in so far.

------
ElFitz
Model Thinking, from coursera. A funny coincidence; last week I reached the...
SIS epidemiology model! Rarely so relevant.

It's quite interesting. Two of the things that fascinated me most so far are
emergent properties (such as in cellular automata models), and what he calls
the models' "fertility".

As an example, with a few adjustments (ie the "recovery rate" becomes a "churn
rate", etc) the SIS model could be adapted in marketing, viral or not, to
measure an existing campaign's efficiency, or try to predict the means a
future one might require based on different assumptions and goals.

Also acted as a nice statistics 101 refresher / intro

~~~
sonabinu
I'm reading the 'Model Thinker'. That's a great course.

------
ch33zer
Quantum Computing for the Very Curious:
[https://quantum.country/qcvc](https://quantum.country/qcvc)

Wonderful into to the topic and easy to understand. It's my first foray into
the field so I really appreciate the Author's writing style.

~~~
luis8
This is awesome! thank you for sharing it. I was looking for something like
this.

------
jozi9
Decided to reverse my long-time TODO list and start from the bottom because I
realised I'd never get there otherwise. It feels so good so I advise everyone
to go and do the same.

For me it looks like this, I'm working on a bootstrapped simple SaaS tool for
devops (docker container monitoring):

\- Clojure so I'm learning FP and Lisp

\- Clojurescript/Reagent so I'm learning SPA/react

\- MongoDB so I'm learning NoSQL

\- Vim so I'm learning editing like a boss

\- SaaS so I'm learning marketing (SEO/Blogging to start with)

------
sunsetSamurai
I'm studying DS and Algorithms, I am a self taught developer and I'm trying to
fill some gaps in my general CS knowledge.

There's a project I want to work on but I feel a bit overwhelmed and don't
know where I should start, I'd appreciate some advice here.

I want to create shogi(Japanese chess) server, similar to lichess, the thing
is that I've never done anything similar to this, I've been reading about web
sockets, this seems like a good place to start. I plan to use elixir for the
backend, is this a good choice? Lichess uses scala, should I use this instead?

~~~
blihp
My advice would be don't bite off so much at once where you'll risk getting
discouraged. Part of the reason you may be feeling overwhelmed is that it
sounds like you're combining three projects: learning a new programming
language, learning network programming, and writing an application server in a
new (to you) domain. Any one of them is potentially enough to keep you quite
busy.

Why not instead start with a language you already know, and figure out how
you'd sketch out a standalone game engine (forget about networking for now) in
that. Then once you think you've got the basic game engine (architecture, at
least) down, _then_ tackle turning it into a network server (again, still
using a language you already know.) Finally, port the thing over to a language
you want to learn (Elixir/Scala/whatever) and you'll have an implementation
you understand well to compare it against. Of course you can rearrange the
sequence... but that's the basic idea.

~~~
sunsetSamurai
I think you're definitely right, I'll try to give it a try using javascript,
and learn the basics of network server along the way. The reason I wanna do it
in elixir is that I wanna learn another language, right now javascript is the
only one I can say that I know kind of well, all my side projects are in js,
so I guess I'm a bit bored of it.

------
EnderMB
I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode.

I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far
away. There aren't many companies hiring in my area at the moment, and if I'm
going to move it's going to be for a big company, so I'm dusting off the CV
and am applying to some Big N companies.

A recruiter recently reached out to me, and I've got an interview with one Big
N company coming up soon, so am using my new-found free time to study and, at
the very least, be a bit more employable at the end of this pandemic.

~~~
scarface74
I use to hate the idea of studying leetCode and I still refuse to do it. But
then I realized how hypocritical I was being considering all of the time I’ve
spent “grinding architecture and infrastructure”, reading white papers and
studying videos on TOGAF so I could talk the talk on an “Enterprise Architect”
or a “Digital Transformation Consultant”. But if I have to play a game to get
the next salary upgrade after I top out as an IC in my local market (not the
West Coast), that’s what I had to do. Who knows? I might end up working in
consulting at AWS or Azure.

But now, with the entire world economy screwed up, I don’t think now is the
right time to make that kind of move. I’ll stick with being just a regular old
Enterprise Developer/Architect/Team Lead/Single Responsible Individual
depending on how the wind blows focusing on healthcare.

~~~
crimsonalucard
Architecture is way easier than algorithms. I'm actually the opposite. I hate
the idea that people are studying intensely for architecture because it just
takes reading the wikipedia summary to get the main point.

Architects are usually just managers who are ex-engineers and have been out of
the front lines for so long that they aren't technical enough to get back into
coding. This is fine, but the idea that "architecture" is some kind of talent
is absurd. Anyone can study a blog article about the latest architecture
buzzword and understand the concepts front to back. Not to mention that the
more physical nature of architecture makes it less flexible than code itself
so "architectural" patterns are, as a result, significantly less abstract and
complex than coding patterns/algorithms.

The true difference in ability is measured by who can actually Build an
architecture, and usually its developers who build it, while architects
(mostly) just talk about it.

~~~
scarface74
_Not to mention that the more physical nature of architecture makes it less
flexible than code itself so "architectural" patterns are, as a result,
significantly less abstract and complex than coding patterns/algorithms._

This is the reason that software engineers need adult supervision. The fact
that you think that modern infrastructure is physical and static displays a
lack of experience. There is nothing static about modern cloud infrastructure.

I just had to deploy an API to ECS/Fargate (Docker). We had to determine the
best combination of memory/cpu of the Fargate runtime environment and what
hardware we wanted to give the ElasticSearch environment. I basically wrote a
CloudFormation template (infrastructure as code) that defined the environment
and then wrote a Node script that ran the CF template and passed in parameters
to vary the hardware environment (cpu/memory). After the environment was
created, the script then ran a series of Artillery load tests, recorded the
results of the load tests, gathered metrics from CloudWatch and estimated the
monthly cost compared to the performance.

We reported that to management to let them decide how much they were willing
to spend for the throughout they needed.

I’ve created entire environments with databases, Redis Caches, ECS clusters
(think AWS version of EKS), etc as a proof of concept by using CloudFormation
deploying code to it, showing management as a demo, and then tearing it all
down just by clicking delete until we can come back to it after the contract
is signed and then spin it back up with one command.

~~~
crimsonalucard
>This is the reason that software engineers need adult supervision. The fact
that you think that modern infrastructure is physical and static displays a
lack of experience. There is nothing static about modern cloud infrastructure.

Note how I said "more physical nature," meaning that it's closer to physical
but not completely physical. Either way, all abstractions suffer from leakage
from the physical world. Data and processes, while seemingly abstract all
occupy physical and temporal space and this fact leaks to all layers of the
stack. Thus, technically, everything in the universe including computation is
physical and nothing is ever purely a virtual entity.

Honestly, you think I don't know about docker? You think I don't know about
the cloud? "Infrastructure as code" oooh buzzwords, you're just using a
shittier domain specific language to write something that you can also do with
Regular code (such as python, no buzzwords needed).

Give me a break, what web developer doesn't know about the above stuff? None.

>I just had to deploy an API to ECS/Fargate (Docker). We had to determine the
best combination of memory/cpu of the Fargate runtime environment and what
hardware we wanted to give the ElasticSearch environment. I basically wrote a
CloudFormation template (infrastructure as code) that defined the environment
and then wrote a Node script that ran the CF template and passed in
parameters...................

OK, the stuff you did isn't even usually what a "architect" does. It's devops.
An architect just diagrams the boxes and lines and gives it to the devops guy
to spit out working infrastructure or a POC. But that's besides the point...

Can you write your own programming language? Can you write your own database?
Can you write your own Operating System? These are actual specialties (none of
which involve "architecture"), not some garbage made up specialty like
"architect." At the very least, if you want to be part of an actual specialty
in the IT world you need to build shit and that shit needs to be HARD to
build, you can't just do some easy diagraming of a bunch of stuff while acting
like you have some superior understanding of the latest architecture pattern
you can look up on wikipedia.

~~~
vp8989
>Honestly, you think I don't know about docker? You think I don't know about
the cloud? "Infrastructure as code" oooh buzzwords, you're just using a
shittier domain specific language to write something that you can also do with
Regular code (such as python, no buzzwords needed).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

~~~
idoby
Well, using general Turing-complete code languages for infra and config vs
specialized templates/languages is a legit point of contention in the industry
right now, although judging by the style, GP isn't considering the pros and
cons of each approach, which include:

* Forcing users to learn a specialized language vs reusing knowledge of a general purpose language

* Inevitable Turing-completeness creep and increasing complexity in specialized languages

* Complexity and difficulty of reasoning about general purpose code (and analyzability)

So GP does have a point. He/she is just not making it very well, I think.

~~~
crimsonalucard
The tradeoffs you mention are obvious right? I'm just sort of downplaying the
huge bragging Scarface was doing when he mentioned he did some cloud formation
and "infrastructure as code" because it's really not that impressive.

It's obvious that the logical consequence of using Turing complete languages
for devops introduce a lot of complexity into infrastructure and can introduce
configuration that executes continuously as well. Bugs that only existed in
the application layer now creep into infrastructure. Infinite recursion can
now be spinning up infinite instances.

That being said the devops thing was a side detail and that's besides the
point. The point is that the role 'software architect' is useless.

~~~
idoby
Obvious? No, and even less straightforward. Personally I think it's a good
thing both kinds of tools exist, because each dev/team/project has different
needs and different sensibilities.

Personally, I prefer my configuration to be written in a plain-old language
(e.g. Python) instead of a specialized config language (be it YAML or JSON
based or whatever). I can test that code, I can reason about it, I can review
it for bad stuff like infinite loops (not perfectly, but still), I know how it
behaves when diffed and merged, etc.

Regarding software architects: I've seen a few companies where architects are
hands-off demigods who prescribe complete architectures without ever having to
contend with the results of their decisions. Those companies are, in my
experience, few, and tend not to do well.

In a lot of other companies, the role of an architect is very similar to what
Herr Scarface describes - individuals with a lot of experience who can make
broad decisions based on both experience and data, and leave it to lower
ranking engineers to work out the exact details. They do the hard/open-ended
stuff and come to conclusions about the broad strokes (e.g. "yeah Redis will
work well for this problem, but since you have denormalized data you might
need a background process to restore consistency"). This is often called
"scoping" and it is the main responsibility and impact of higher-ranking
engineers (whether they're called "architects" or not, I personally dislike
the term).

~~~
crimsonalucard
>In a lot of other companies, the role of an architect is very similar to what
Herr Scarface describes - individuals with a lot of experience who can make
broad decisions based on both experience and data, and leave it to lower
ranking engineers to work out the exact details. They do the hard/open-ended
stuff and come to conclusions about the broad strokes (e.g. "yeah Redis will
work well for this problem, but since you have denormalized data you might
need a background process to restore consistency"). This is often called
"scoping" and it is the main responsibility and impact of higher-ranking
engineers (whether they're called "architects" or not, I personally dislike
the term).

It seems like these people are capable but most actually are not. The reason
is because they spent too much time in this role so they lose the skills of
actually being a software engineer and gain the skills of bullshitting about
architecture. So when you "interview" or talk to these people it really sounds
like they know they're shit when they don't. The reason is, it's basically
their job to talk about technology so they become really good at it, and if an
interview doesn't involve a technical coding part, then they'll ace those
interviews with flying colors.

If you get down to the nitty gritty and literally ask these guys to perform
some very easy coding problem or actually implement a product you will tend to
see a very high amount of incompetence.

I work at a startup where we accidentally hired one of these architects. The
guy bullshitted his way to the top but we're having a hard time giving him a
ticket where he works on the actual product. He's politically maneuvering his
way around to only work on proof of concepts and holding irrelevant meetings
to talk about architecture. Even roped the CTO in to support his case, which
completely pissed off the entire team. Startups need people who can get the
job done, not someone who can create a little bullshit bubble so that he can
keep his bullshit salary.

This is very similar to someone who's been a CTO for many years. If you don't
program, if you don't actually build architecture, you lose your technical
skills but you gain bullshitting and management skills. This isn't actually
completely bad as a companies need leadership and managers and sans the
bullshitting part, leadership is a great skill.

It is completely wrong to assume that "Architecture" is some sort of skillset
and that an "Architect" is more technically capable (due to the hire rank)
than a typical engineer. Give them the title they deserve, and that is: Ex-
engineer/manager.

>Obvious? No, and even less straightforward. Personally I think it's a good
thing both kinds of tools exist, because each dev/team/project has different
needs and different sensibilities.

It's obvious to me the difference between configuration files and turing
complete programs or even python. You can extrapolate the benefits of using
python or a configuration file. Have you hit an infinite loop error using
python to instantiate instances? Maybe once or maybe zero times, but you can
still use your brain to extrapolate that this is a potential problem even when
you've hit this problem Zero times.

On a side note, you can also extrapolate that JSON and YAML can be turing
complete. It depends on how something interprets it. For example:

    
    
       {"fib": {
          "PARAMS": {"y": "float"},
          "BASECASE": [["X", "==", 0 ], [1]]
          "RECURSE": [{"EXECUTE_FUNCTION": {
                          "FUNCTION": "fib",
                          "PARAMS": [["y", "-", 1 ]]
             }}, "+", {"EXECUTE_FUNCTION": {
                          "FUNCTION": "fib",
                          "PARAMS": [["y", "-", 2 ]]
             }}}, 
        "main": {"EXECUTE_FUNCTION": {
                          "FUNCTION": "fib",
                          "PARAMS": [["y", "-", 1 ]]
             }}
       }
     

Awkward yes, but I'm just showing you a way where it can be possible in my
garbage/made-up JSON above. Which you can extrapolate from that there probably
is a much more elegant way of doing it. All you really need are two features:
branching and self-reference. JSON or YAML does not actually preclude
something to be not turing complete.

>Personally, I prefer my configuration to be written in a plain-old language
(e.g. Python) instead of a specialized config language (be it YAML or JSON
based or whatever). I can test that code, I can reason about it, I can review
it for bad stuff like infinite loops (not perfectly, but still), I know how it
behaves when diffed and merged, etc.

Yeah, I'm kind of in agreement with you here as a personal preference.

------
lobo_tuerto
Elixir and Phoenix!

It's been a long time coming, but finally doing it now.

After coming to grips with functional programming concepts (introductory in
Ruby, more advanced in JavaScript) I decided to explore Elixir and what I
found really surprised me in the right way.

So I've decided to dedicate myself to become very fluent in it.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Excellent!

If I may self-promote a tiny bit, I've made over 100 free Elixir screencasts
on YT over the past couple years, with over 98% upvotes. Helping people in
your situation was why I started the channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1nKbzZiRtY&list=PLFhQVxlaKQ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1nKbzZiRtY&list=PLFhQVxlaKQEl_-
IPHs3TVLJDH64_ddSQP)

------
kilroy123
I've been learning a lot about options trading. (Yes, I understand the risks,
being margin called, and losing all my money.) To me, it's just a fun and
interesting hobby.

I've also been reading and learning a lot about dirivities and the overall US
financial system. It's pretty wild how things _actually_ work behind the
scenes. So much "wealth" has been created coming up with such schemes. The
more I learn, the more I worry about us being in some serious uncharted
waters, and I think maybe it's all too complicated.

~~~
lucky518
Would it be okay sharing how you are approaching options trading? What steps
would you recommend someone who would like to start with the basics?

~~~
itemGrey
I'm also interested in this. Would be great to share some resources.

~~~
arminiusreturns
I also have been learning about options. My goal has been to understand the
financial sector better first and foremost, and only secondary is making some
money. I am a newb whos only been going for about 6mos at this so fair warning
to not listen to me at all.

1\. The entire market is a big casino. The main question is what kind of risk
you want to assume in your bet. Everything you do in the market is a
bet/gamble. Don't fool yourself otherwise.

2\. Options are a high risk avenue, but can also have some of the highest
returns.

3\. Learn the lingo. Traders use it so much you will be lost if you don't.
([https://www.investorsunderground.com/acronyms/](https://www.investorsunderground.com/acronyms/))

4\. Start small to learn the ins and outs of your broker.

5\. Understand that stocks are not a reflection of the companies actual value.
They are a reflection of the markets perceived value of the company. The
difference is enormous.

6\. Do your own DD (due diligence). Read the docs the company has and is
putting out. Do your own math. Don't rely on analysts, but you can use them as
a reference.

7\. Learn what IV crush is!!! (theta gang ftw)

8\. Learn the most common strategies used. The wheel, put debit spread, cash
covered calls, etc. Different situations and risk profiles in the moment are
better suited to certain strategies.

9\. See what crazy plays turned out good, and which ones bad, and seeing what
strategy was used, how was the DD, etc.

10\. Lastly, and less commonly talked about, never underestimate the power of
powerful people's connections and interests in a company/stock. This is why I
tend to focus heavily on ownership analysis and board analysis. Sometimes
every normal, quant level algorithmic indicator points one way, but the
connections say otherwise... and the connections almost always win out.

Bonus material:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcmZHsuUt_DOzcgIcLd0Qnw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcmZHsuUt_DOzcgIcLd0Qnw)

------
zelphirkalt
I am revisiting my notes and re-watching lectures about basic machine learning
algorithms like linear regression and logistic regression.

I am implementing these algorithms, so I need to understand a lot of the
details. Here are some notes, which are work in progress:
[https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/machine-learning-
notes/...](https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/machine-learning-
notes/src/dev/linear-and-logistic-regression/linear-and-logistic-
regression.pdf) I try to write it in a way, that does not leave open questions
and will be accessible to me and hopefully others years later.

------
REALiSTiC
Systems Thinking, mainly through reading Russell Ackoff's books. The Art of
Problem Solving is good, Turning Learning Right Side Up is eye-opening (and
definitely one of my favorite books lately) and currently reading Redesigning
Society. Highly recommended.

~~~
phatle
I'm reading this subject too. Thinking in Systems: A Primer is also a good
book. Highly recommended.

~~~
REALiSTiC
I started it couple of months ago, but couldn't get past the first few
chapters. It was too dry for my taste. Even though she's a brilliant scientist
(I'd recommend checking her classic The Limit to Growth), it seemed like the
earlier resources about the topic are much better explained rather than the
newer stuff.

------
troxwalt
How to take care of a toddler from 5 AM - 8 PM while trying to manage work and
phone calls. Then how to not fall asleep while I"m working on projects until 1
AM. So learning how to function on 4-6 hours of sleep.

~~~
divbzero
I have a renewed appreciation of so much that we usually take for granted,
chief among those are the contributions of our teachers and child care
professionals.

------
urxvtcd
I watched all but one of Lamport's videos on formal specification with TLA+,
though I yet have to tackle some project with it.

Right now I got my hands on Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information" as per some HNer recommendation (thank you!).

Yeah, I lose interest quickly, eh. There's so much cool things to learn that
in the end I learn nothing well. Bummer.

edit: grammar, spelling

~~~
sp527
If you consider how knowledge decays, your strategy makes more sense. You get
to something like Pareto proficiency in a subject and can then ‘reactivate’
that knowledge more easily in the future, should it be required.

You are also of course aware of that knowledge in the first place, which may
be even more important. In the timeless Rumsfeldian: you have pushed back a
bit at the unknown unknowns.

The alternative path of deeply learning something you may never apply (e.g.
what happens to many PhDs) seems inherently less desirable, in my opinion.

------
doctoboggan
I am learning Vue.

I built a basic tool to help my wife track how much time she spends on
Telehealth calls, you can see it here:

[https://telehealth-tracker.onrender.com](https://telehealth-
tracker.onrender.com)

She is a family medicine doctor and now virtually 100% of her time now doing
phone calls instead of clinic visits. She wants to do a QI project and needed
to be able to track the amount of time her and her colleagues spend on various
parts of the Telehealth visit.

~~~
gtirloni
May I ask what resources did you use to learn it?

~~~
doctoboggan
I mostly just followed the tutorial on their website and read through their
documentation.

------
xzel
Nim! There was thread here about its new release. I hadn't given any time to
looking at the syntax so I finally did because of that thread. Looks awesome.
It doesn't look like hackerrank or leetcode support nim so I'll be trying out
the different compiling outputs as well.

------
davemo
I’ve been working on my music production skills with a learn monthly class
from Andrew Huang. It’s been good to push myself into production; I have many
years of live music experience but haven’t spent a lot of time recording.

I’d classify my style as synth wave meets 80s arena rock for the current track
I’ve been working on :)

My learning path is here [0] and I’ve also been uploading works in progress to
my soundcloud [1]

[0] [https://learnmonthly.com/u/dave-mosher-e2bc26/andrew-
huang-m...](https://learnmonthly.com/u/dave-mosher-e2bc26/andrew-huang-music)

[1] [https://m.soundcloud.com/dmosher](https://m.soundcloud.com/dmosher)

~~~
hrnnnnnn
Synthwave meets arena rock? If you haven't heard it already you're going to
love this!

[https://youtu.be/98DDgbtE-eU](https://youtu.be/98DDgbtE-eU)

~~~
davemo
haha this was epic! thanks for sharing :D

------
DavidSJ
Reading: _The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money_ by Keynes.

Studying: _The Molecular Biology of the Cell_ by Alberts et al and _Advanced
Macroeconomics_ by Romer.

~~~
viburnum
Geoff Mann wrote an excellent free guide to the GT. I had just finished
reading Keynes when I came across it and reading it really made it “stick.”

[https://www.versobooks.com/books/2499-the-general-theory-
of-...](https://www.versobooks.com/books/2499-the-general-theory-of-
employment-interest-and-money)

~~~
jmeister
Thanks!

------
thomas2718
I have a cranky uncle who sends an email newsletter with links. Most of the
links are conspiracy theories in my eyes. Some of them are about the climate.
So to be able to make reasonable judgements, I've decided to learn about the
science of climate. The IPCC makes all their reports available. I've started
with the technical summary (84 pages, two-column). Most parts of it are well
written and understandable with some basic knowledge of physics and chemistry.
Nevertheless, it took several man-days to read it. As there is high confidence
that the current warming is caused by humans, I've joined Citizens' Climate
Lobby to contribute to the right laws to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.

The same newsletter made me read a book about motivational psychology (The
Righteous Mind). A very interesting topic, that I would love to learn more
about, if I had more time.

Last year I've (re-)read Category Theory for Programmers. I had tried it once
before, but gave up after a third, as the notation didn't make much sense to
me anymore. I would like to read it again, creating flash cards for the most
important concepts along the way.

~~~
jmeister
To form a balanced opinion, wouldn’t you want to read CC critical literature
too?

------
olalonde
Writing my first library/cli in Rust. Never felt so productive in a systems
level language but I still quite haven't internalized the variable ownership
system and will probably look back at my code in a few months with total
disgust. I'm on Rust's discord server ([https://discord.gg/rust-
lang](https://discord.gg/rust-lang)) if any fellow learners want to chat.

~~~
pcvonz
I too started picking up Rust with the goal of trying out embedded
development. I'm taking it slow though -- working through the book and a
little cli tool. I am also on the discord.

------
ktzar
How to deal with my kids 7 days a week!

------
shabirgilkar
I'm learning Motion/Animation graphics in Adobe After Effects and 3D design in
Cinema 4D Lite.I'm still beginner in both. Just in case you have wonderful
resources to share to get me started, please share!

For Adobe AE I'm learning on these Youtube channels:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQyoKfULtJaHqSxB80Efw4w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQyoKfULtJaHqSxB80Efw4w)
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC64eec0UYHxflyEWgyZOvLA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC64eec0UYHxflyEWgyZOvLA)
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP3AIk974-PeB9bg1Mc7wug](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP3AIk974-PeB9bg1Mc7wug)

For 3D:
[https://www.3dfordesigners.com/blog?tag=learn+cinema+4d+lite](https://www.3dfordesigners.com/blog?tag=learn+cinema+4d+lite)

------
echelon
Photogrammetry.

I'm (re)learning OpenCV and OpenGL since I haven't used them since college.
Working on this is also forcing me to learn the FFI corners of Rust I was
unfamiliar with.

I'm combining Kinect (k4a) depth sensor data to build real time 360 degree
point clouds.

~~~
canada_dry
Interesting project. Hope you'll post to github with whatever you get working.

------
Balgair
Going through the Western cannon. Specifically the Syntopicon and a
rejiggering of it.

I've always thought the work was an absolute masterpiece, but utterly
inaccessible and the holotype for the word _jargon_. So, I'm trying to write
vignettes of the work, with characters that personify the 'great ideas' in the
Syntopicon. Something like _Godel, Escher, Bach_. Hopefully, this
personification will be more accessible and readable than a gigantic listing
of page numbers and linking information.

Thus far, yeah, just wrapping my head about the linking documents is tough,
but there is a lot of 'meat' on the bones and turning ideas into people is
surprisingly fun.

I doubt I'll ever finish the project, but it's a great deep dive into the
Western Cannon.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World)

------
hkhanna
Reading SICP[0] while taking the original MIT 6.001 course online[1]. I'm
hoping to develop a DSL for certain applications in government and law
someday.

[0] The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman
and Sussman

[1] [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
compu...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/)

------
codegeek
A bootstrapped SAAS founder who sucks at Marketing. So I have decided to
invest time learning everything about Marketing and Digital Marketing. From
the ground up. Btw on that note, has anyone heard of Demand Curve which
teaches Marketing courses ? I like some of their stuff online and thinking
about taking their Premium Course.

~~~
jlbnjmn
I do in-house marketing and digital marketing. What challenges are you facing?

(I don't have a course to sell you and my services are not available for
hire.)

~~~
codegeek
Thx for asking. oo, where do I start ? I guess setting up an overall strategy
before any actual tactical execution. We do close to 1M in revenue already and
have inbound traffic already but I got to this point somehow without any real
planning. We write a few blog posts, content etc, got social profiles where we
post, were lucky to get a few great backlinks and have built some
relationships with influencers in our industry. But what do we now ? I have no
real strategy here. Should we run ads ? Where ? Why google and not linkedin or
vice versa ?

~~~
58x14
There’s two divergent approaches to learning, sometimes referred to as top-
down or bottom-up.

Top-down begins with broad context, such as the history of programming
languages, the advent of objects and classes, and eventually zoom in to modern
languages, syntax and functions.

Bottom-up works inversely; maybe you’re given a Python sandbox, a hello world,
and a cheat sheet. You explore what you can do and build on those low-level
operators to create foundations that frame wider context.

Effective learning is always a mix of both. Everyone learns somewhere on the
spectrum, maybe bouncing around depending on motivation and experience.

With respect to your goal of learning marketing, you’ve identified your path
of study: strategy. And just like your SaaS product was created out of an
understanding of functions and needs in a space, so too should your research
explore the functions available to your business and how they’ll affect your
pipeline.

Simplified: you have a tool, and since you have revenue, you know people want
it. Your goal is to find questions to ask and answer them, and use that
feedback to make decisions regarding your marketing strategy.

-What is my biggest source of traffic to my site? Where do they spend the most time? What causes them to click buy? How can I use these data to optimize my funnel?

-What is my total marketing cost divided by the number of paying users (CPA)? What’s their expected lifetime value? What do other products in my space cost?

-What do my customers and affiliates describe my product as? What problems disappear once they subscribe? How does this translate to value for decision makers? Do my enterprise sales represent 80% of MRR or 10%? Should I use multiple approaches to entities of different scale?

The questions you’re asking are the right ones. And like any other field, they
multiply and become more specific - but if you bear in mind the top-down goal
(spend less, charge more) of a business, things will crystallize quickly.

------
AndreasBackx
I'm currently trying to get into game development and Rust so I'm trying out
Amethyst:
[https://book.amethyst.rs/master/](https://book.amethyst.rs/master/). I wanted
to follow along with a roguelike game tutorial for Rust, but there was a
problem. I would love to make some games that you can play co-op with some
friends as I feel like there aren't enough games like it out there.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Nice! I just did a simple roguelike in Rust a few months ago. I somewhat
regret not looking at what it would take to make is work with wasm from the
beginning, though.

~~~
AndreasBackx
Did you happen to use this?
[https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/](https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/)
If not, what did you use?

~~~
AlchemistCamp
I learned from this tutorial, which is a bit simpler:
[https://tomassedovic.github.io/roguelike-
tutorial/](https://tomassedovic.github.io/roguelike-tutorial/)

I have been wanting to go through the tutorial you shared when I get the time,
though!

------
Liwink
Learning database systems now. Andy Pavlo made two of his great classes
public. Class materials and videos are online. Thomas Neumann's papers are
also really good.

\-
[https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2019/schedule.html](https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2019/schedule.html)
\-
[https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2020/schedule.html](https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2020/schedule.html)
\- [https://umbra-db.com/](https://umbra-db.com/) \- [https://hyper-
db.de/](https://hyper-db.de/)

------
uoaei
Nonlinear optimization algorithms.

At work I'm working on anomaly detection using ML at the edge and want to move
beyond bog-standard stochastic gradient descent to fit the model(s) in favor
of methods that exploit the use of analytical Jacobians / Hessians. So I'm
comparing and contrasting the various nonlinear (gradient-based) optimization
methods for my use cases and trying to see how fast I can make them run.

------
XCSme
I'm learning how to play the piano and also trying to learn more music theory
so my guitar playing is not just randomly playing notes or just following
online tabs.

I am also going to soon start marketing my project [0] so I am reading a lot
about launching products, pricing and how to attract attention.

[0]
[https://www.usertrack.net/features.php](https://www.usertrack.net/features.php)

------
hhsuey
Taking a math course that attempts to teach some of the ways mathematicians
approach their profession, which I hear is quite different than learning math
or doing math the way it is taught in schools or utilized by other types of
professionals (e.g. engineers). The class is called "Introduction to
Mathematical Thinking" by Keith Devlin, and it's on coursera.org.

~~~
noobrunner
Interesting. how useful you think it is for regular techies or let's say
aspiring ML engineers ?

------
OzzyB
Flutter -- and I'm in love -- it's like being a Flash developer/designer from
2006 all over again :)

~~~
kirubakaran
So, soon to be obsolete, abandoned by s/Adobe/Google/g? :-p

Just kidding, I'm building the mobile client for
[https://histre.com/](https://histre.com/) in Flutter and I love it. Google,
please don't kill it yet.

~~~
OzzyB
Ha! Let's hope not, in fact let's pray that it becomes the de facto standard
for Android dev :D

~~~
StrauXX
How much "better"/different is flutter compared to native Android development
in your experience? I am currently being forced to do learn native Android
development with Java and hate every second of it.

~~~
OzzyB
Ok, let me try:

\- The tooling is excellent -- you can get a basic app running without much
fuss; use VScode and the right plugins are you're golden.

\- It's "Widgets All The Way Down" \-- just wrap your widgets (objects) to add
functionality/positioning/etc (it might seem like you're in "nesting hell" but
it's actually quite intuitive and you don't need to manage tons of separate
Components across tons of files which is nice).

\- The layout engine is actually well thought out -- it might take a while to
get used to it (it's not like CSS there are no negative margins for example)
but once you do it's intuitive and easy to get layouts built fast. Remember
everything is a Widget and that's ok, from your app root object to your
button.

\- It has the best parts of React -- Flutter's "setState" works much in the
same way and only updates Widgets which need to etc.

\- It's a "game engine built for mobile dev"; you hear this statement a lot
and it's really what makes it's powerful. It renders super fast and
animations/tweens/etc are easy to implement allowing you to design UI elements
the way you want (hence my Flash comparison lol).

\- At some point you will need to manage state, save yourself the search and
just settle w/ BLOC, again there's plugins to help with the boilerplate, i.e.
code-generation (which is also a thing and actually helpful).

\- The package/ecosystem (pub.dev) is pretty young but the core stuff you'll
need is all there. The main packages I've settled on are: Moor (sqlite), Bloc
(state), Chooper (Api client) and JsonSerializer. UI packages are pretty hit-
miss but you'll probably just write your own anyway.

\- The SDK has tons of prebuilt Widgets that are actually useful and cover
most of what you need to make a modern UI, and yes you can make a "native"
Android/iOS UI look and feel if you want. I recommend watching the Flutter's
Youtube channel series "Widget of the Week".

\- Dart is a fine language, I love the way it's implemented async/await for
example, should be no problem picking up if you have Javascript/Java
experience. The great benefit is that it's only being used by Flutter so
there's a nice symbiosis between the two with a strong focus on making a
language geared towards interactive/ui/frontend work.

\- No Android XML!

Hope that helps some xD

~~~
StrauXX
Thank you for that summary! ^^ That sounds like a great environment to work
with. I will definitely keep a look on flutter.

------
mbrameld
I'm learning to teach people how to fly helicopters. I got my private pilot
license, instrument rating, and commercial pilot license over the last couple
years and now I'm knocking out the flight instructor rating.

Tech-wise I'm digging into machine learning, particularly around natural
language processing and sentiment analysis.

------
bcrosby95
Been learning Elixir. I loved Erlang and Elixir smooths out a lot of the rough
edges for me. Planning to use it for a web-based multiplayer RPG.

------
timc3
I am learning Elixir and Phoenix. And to be honest I am not sure I like
either. The lack of decent resources (I mainly use Python and JavaScript with
some C#) so I am used to reading a lot of blog posts, I don’t really like the
documentation and the answers in forums are over verbose. And then there is
Ecto which gives me new respect for SQLAlchemy or even solutions in C#.
Debugging is a bit rubbish as well and to top it off it’s not typed. Pattern
matching is kinda cool though.

~~~
seneca
The book "Programming Elixir" is by far the best resource I found for learning
the language.

~~~
timc3
I am going to read it, I have heard good things so will put it on the todo
list for this week. I usually enjoy learning languages so I don’t know why I
am hating on this so much ( last time I felt like this was with Ruby which was
mainly due to the community )

------
cordite
I am reading A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography [1] by Dan Boneh and
Victor Shoup, it's a work-in-progress theory and math heavy book. However it
gives a deep understanding of what's going on and what can be assembled
together. Unlike other crypto books, it isn't just glorifying DES, AES, and
RSA.

[1]
[https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cryptobook/BonehShoup_0_4....](https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cryptobook/BonehShoup_0_4.pdf)

------
martinturner
At Miracle, Digital Marketing and Transformation Agency in Hong Kong, we help
our clients improve digital services to make them simple, clear and fast. We
help our client transform, create and improve their product in a digital way
such as branding, web & app design, e-commerce solution, Digital Marketing
strategy, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality(AR), SEO. We are experts
in their fields and enjoy challenging work. We work together to share
knowledge and build our capability to improve user experiences. This helps us
work smarter and more effectively. We are confident, capable and committed. We
nurture curiosity and encourage our people to keep learning. We have flexible
work arrangements and a supportive environment. We help our people balance
their whole life and be the best version of themselves.
[https://www.miracles.com.hk/](https://www.miracles.com.hk/)

------
miqkt
D3 for work, and Russian out of pure (seemingly masochistic) interest.

I'm a native English speaker and Russian would be my fourth language. Perhaps
I'm simply approaching the limits of my language ability, but the grammar
rules with cases that I've learnt so far are doing my head in. It's very
discouraging. I don't intend on becoming completely fluent, and so I'm trying
to find shortcuts to be fuzzy about the volume of grammar rules to keep in
mind.

~~~
spydr
So you actually find it difficult? I am a native Russian speaker and have also
taken 3 quarters of Russian in college. Compared to English I found the
grammar much easier to understand. A word is read exactly how you would sound
out each letter (with a few exceptions). Ukrainian grammar is even more
simple.

~~~
jumasheff
RE: "word is read exactly how you would sound out each letter (with a few
exceptions)" nah, you write "короче", but you should say "кароче", write
"остовайтесь" but read "аставайтесь" etc. otherwise you'll sound funny.
Russian has a lot of exceptions.

------
war1025
I spent a couple hours this afternoon trying to start a fire with a cheap
magnifying glass. If I had a decent tinder bundle I would have succeeded.
Amazing how easy it is to get something smoking. Burnt a whole bunch of stuff,
just never managed to get to fire.

~~~
Breza
May I suggest dryer lint as tinder. I keep all of mine in a bucket for just
that purpose.

~~~
war1025
I'll have to give that a try next time.

We have some Lamb's Ear [1] in our garden that I had a decent amount of
success with, but I used up most of the dead stuff from last year over the
course of the afternoon.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stachys_byzantina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stachys_byzantina)

------
qxfys
I am learning how wireguard [1] works, and try to prove their claim that it is
suitable for small embedded device, i.e. this one [2].

[1] [https://www.wireguard.com/](https://www.wireguard.com/)

[2]
[https://github.com/Zolertia/Resources/wiki/Firefly](https://github.com/Zolertia/Resources/wiki/Firefly)

------
collyw
I really think the idea of constantly learning (something new) is pushed too
much in our field. I think we should encourage mastery in fewer topics rather
than shallow superficial knowledge of lots of things.

It's a balance I know, and we shouldn't be super focused especially early on
in our careers. But at my current job we have a huge tech stack and a tiny
team, I am constantly learning, but never in any depth, just enough to solve
the last bug and then change to something different. It feels very like a very
unproductive way of working. Very little of the new tech feels like it
actually helps. Kubernetes while we don't actually need to scale for the
foreseeable future. NoSQl when we don't actually need to scale. Asynch web
servers when synchronous would be fine. A React monstrosity on our frontend,
when server side rendering would be perfectly functional for the problems we
are trying to solve. Google cloud - fair enough we actually do need that one
or something equivalent.

Edit: On looking through the other answers I see that a significant number are
not tech related which is refreshing to see.

~~~
freddref
Right, I think the key is learning something new in an area where you know the
least. Even getting to know the simplest concepts can go a long way.

My favorite example: cropping a photo to improve composition. It's simple and
easy to do, but it can have a comparatively large impact on a photo.

Learning more and more specialized tech can give diminishing returns.

~~~
collyw
Yes that makes sense to an extent. The problem is that people were insisting
on using MongoDB for problems better suited to a relational DB when it was
faishionable, and now that decision lives on 6 years later.

Or I see a lot of CV's where people collect web frameworks - which essentially
do the same thing. Yet whenever I inherit Django code, it seems to be done by
someone with only the most basic knowledge of how to get things done.

------
kiliantics
I've been rebuilding the engine of a 1980 Honda motorcycle for the last while.
Just following the manual and reading on forums and watching youtube videos.
Yesterday, I finally got it fully back together and put it on the bike and
reassembled everything else. It didn't start perfectly but it did start, which
was really satisfying. There is a little more "debugging" left to do on it but
I believe I will get it back in shape eventually. All this from no knowledge
of engine mechanics a few months ago, I now feel like I can competently talk
about the different parts of a combustion engine and do some basic diagnosis
for vehicle problems.

Doing this has been one of the best experiences in my life and it was a very
cheap bike to buy and I only needed a pretty basic set of tools on top of it.
I don't own other vehicles but I bet that, down the line, it will save me a
lot of money that I may otherwise have given to mechanics. I would recommend
doing this to anyone that has an interest in it, it doesn't take expert
knowledge, just a healthy level of gumption :)

------
my_green_book
I am learning how to write. After seeing a few people with blog, I realize the
importance of writing. It makes you think clearer and understand a subject
deeper.

~~~
input_sh
Honestly, there's not much to learn there, you just need regular exercise to
become better and better at it.

May I suggest setting yourself a fixed schedule (let's say, one article
published every two weeks or so) and sticking through it? Your initial
articles will probably suck, but you'll gradually improve in the upcoming
months.

------
mr_puzzled
I want to learn how to build a phone, maybe something like the pine64 and
librem phones. I'm a web dev so it's..challenging. How do I learn to:

* understand the hardware components required in a phone?

* understand the software components required? postmarketos and plasma mobile maybe?

* How do I even start to build a prototype? What components would I use? Maybe start with using a raspberry pi to make a DIY phone?

I know this is an open ended question, so any pointers would be appreciated.

~~~
mettamage
If you really have no clue about anything, then I might be able to help a tiny
bit.

Get basic hardware knowledge by doing nand2tetris [1]. It's about building a
computer from the transistor up, all the way until you create your own tetris
game.

The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware (manufacturing
hardware in Shenzen) [2]

This guy shows a cool couple of YouTube videos on hacking iPhones in Shenzen
[3]. Hacking as in exploring and tweaking, not as in breaking in.

[1] [https://www.nand2tetris.org/](https://www.nand2tetris.org/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Hacker-Adventures-Making-
Bre...](https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Hacker-Adventures-Making-Breaking-
ebook/dp/B06XDHKV94)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid)

~~~
sloaken
Thanks, I have ordered the book and plan to start the nand2tetris. I really
loved the way the guy explained the HDL. Very clear, I look forward to
learning it and doing a lot with it.

------
non-entity
Trying to figure out how to teach myself EE.

It looks like theres basically two suggestions:

A) Following the same sort of curriculum a university would teach. I'd have to
manage to dredge through the math, but I suppose it's possible but would lead
to probably the most competence. Unfortunately however, I was hoping for the
big MOOC sites to have more content. EdX has some decent introductory stuff
but not much beyond that.

B) The other recommended way is the hobbyist way and what I suspect most other
software people wouldnauggest which is just building shit that interests you,
ignoring first principles. Unfortunately I'm not sure how this would work out,
since my projects in any domain seem to be a bit, er, grand and you supposedly
need a strong math background to build anything more than basic circuits.

I'd dread the math a lot less if it were more cut and dry. I wish I could just
jump right to calc, differential equations, linear algebra, etc. But more
realistically, it would involve me hunt and picking parts of algebra and
embarrassingly even simpler stuff. I was looking at some Khan academy stuff
and while it turns out I remember more than I thought, theres still plenty I
had forgot even existed.

Another alternative that seems good, but not realistic is that there are some
community colleges that have professional certificates that teach electronic
circuits pretty quickly. Unfortunately this is prohibited by the absolutely
fucked "residency requirements" for this state whereby I wont be a resident of
my current state for years (at least for tuition purposes, I'm a resident for
just about everything in a few months). Also those courses are all in person
which, for some unique reasons dont fit my life situation.

~~~
zargon
What kind of "grand" circuits are we talking about here? As someone who
entered EE through the hobbyist approach, there isn't much I'm interested in
that has me wishing I had formal EE education background. Do you want to do
analog? Because there's hardly any math involved in practical applications of
digital electronics.

~~~
non-entity
The last 2 ideas I had were a ISA SATA card (dont ask) and attempting to build
a DOCSIS modem (because issues with my shitty ISP supplied one intrigued me).

I actually tried to build a Arduino based EPROM reader for a chip I extracted
from an old electronic device, but ran into some issues and am kinda
discouraged because that seems like it was pretty basic.

~~~
zargon
ISA SATA card makes perfect sense to me. :) All those MFM drives are dead or
dying. Protocols like SATA are implemented in hardware, and you buy an IC
controller chip for the purpose. So the task with this project is to implement
something that talks to the SATA controller and something that talks to the
ISA bus, and bridge the two. Problem is that most SATA controllers will be
designed to connect to a PCIe bus. Probably easiest to use a SATA-PATA bridge
chip. Not sure how easy those are to find these days.

DOCSIS -- yeah, that's a lot of specialized knowledge to make a good one. A
huge part of the complexity for that is probably board layout stuff. EMI &
EMC, etc. This is a whole separate field of study on its own.

Getting that EEPROM reader working sounds like a good starter project. There's
huge variation of EEPROMs though, so it would be sensible to focus on just the
EEPROM you have. Who knows, your issues could have been a problem with the
scavenged chip. But I2C (if your chip was I2C) is finicky and every chip seems
to do it slightly differently.

------
aerovistae
Learning the bond market, figuring out the different characteristics of all
the different types of bonds, what the risks are, what the potential for gain
is.

I trade options on equities regularly and recently a friend has been looking
for help on figuring out how to handle a large amount of money they came into,
so I figured brushing up on bond investing would be helpful since their risk
tolerance is substantially lower than mine.

~~~
mathisonturing
What resource are you using for bonds and what did you use for learning
options?

I've become interested in stocks/trading recently and have been wanting to
understand it well enough before losing all my money. I started Financial
Markets [0]. Just finished Week 1 and it seems a little too broad/dry so far.
Any recommendations are welcome.

[0] [https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-
global](https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global)

~~~
aerovistae
I taught myself by reading a lot of articles online, basically. I start by
googling something basic and clicking the first 4-6 results and reading them,
opening a lot of extra tabs for things they link to as I go. If anything is
unclear, I repeat the process, googling the unclear thing. I take notes as I
go.

Slowly a general understanding emerges and then I can flesh it out by seeking
specific details once I know what I don't know. And by reading and comparing
multiple resources I get a very full and objective understanding.

Investopedia has been the single most helpful site by a wide margin. Their
content is top notch.

When I hit on something I can't find the answer to, I ask the customer service
at my brokerage (Etrade) and they're very helpful. But if it's a very specific
question, I've found I'm best off asking to speak to their customer service
team for that specific thing, like their bond desk or futures desk, etc.

------
_hardwaregeek
I'm learning the ins and outs of WebAssembly. I just picked back up writing my
compiler to WASM for my toy programming language (think JS crossed with ML).
Right now I'm getting a feel for writing stack based bytecode and implementing
basic features like local variables and control flow. It's not much, but I
just got factorial to compile in my language which felt totally awesome.

~~~
enos_feedler
This sounds really neat. Do you have an open source repo for this? Would love
to check it out. What framework are you using to write the compiler itself?
LLVM, or something else?

~~~
_hardwaregeek
Here's the repo:
[https://github.com/nicholaslyang/saber](https://github.com/nicholaslyang/saber)
Fair warning, the code is _quite_ gnarly.

I'm not using any frameworks. Took a bit to figure out code generating wasm,
but once I got the basic emitter/IR working it got a little easier. Plus you
start being able to read the binary format after a bit of practice.

------
anon012012
Rhetoric, sophistry, debating. Politics. The goal is to establish UBI before
the end of the year. If I had been smart enough I would have specialized in
AI.

I think there's untapped potential for techies and scientists to infiltrate
the political landscape.

I don't think I'll ever be famous but I'm arguing everyday and pushing hard
for people to fight for themselves, and to push the ideas.

------
muralimadhu
Doing a deep learning course through fast.ai. Has been fun so far. For an ML
noob, I like how we talk about deploying something end to end right from the
first class and work our way backwards to the theory

------
dmux
I've been interested in the Tcl language since 2010 or so but have only
written small scripts up to this point in time. I decided it was finally time
to dive in so I've been working my way through "The Tcl Programming Language:
A Comprehensive Guide" by Ashok P. Nadkarni as well as learning about the
Naviserver ecosystem.

------
mattlondon
Porting [http://imrannazar.com/GameBoy-Emulation-in-
JavaScript](http://imrannazar.com/GameBoy-Emulation-in-JavaScript) to
Typescript as a way to learn about how to write an emulator, as well as taking
advantage of newer JavaScript APIs (e.g. requestAnimationFrame, ArrayBuffer
etc) that were not available when this series of articles was written in 2010.

We had a gameboy as a kid, but the ZX Spectrum (also Z80 CPU-based) meant more
to me so hope to take what I learn from the great articles from imrannazar.com
and apply to writing a ZX Speccy emulator (the gameboy had dedicated-hardware
for sprites etc so not everything will be transferable).

Yes both gameboy & spectrum emulators in javascript have been done already,
but this is just for personal learning/fun/itch-scratching. It has been quite
instructive both from a remembering-fundamental-cs-classes/how-computers-
really-work perspective, as well as modern javascript

------
oblib
I've been watching youtube videos about ancient cultures and sites. Some of
them are lectures that are very well down, others go off on some pretty silly
tangents but the videos of the sites they show are often pretty good and
that's as close as I'll ever get to visiting most of them so I focus on that
when they get to talking about aliens building them and what not. I think I've
about exhausted that line though.

I've also spent a bit of time watching youtube videos on a channel called
"RÜNGE CARS". This guy hand forms aluminum bodies and builds his own chassis
and they're pretty cool cars he making. The craftsmanship is impressive and so
is the process. He pretty much takes you through it step by step. I still have
quite a few of those to take in.

Aside from that CouchDB 3.0 was release just a couple weeks ago so I'm
learning about what's new and how it applies to my work. They're doing some
impressive work on that.

~~~
Beefin
ancient cultures videos sound cool, and recs?

~~~
sddhrthrt
+1

~~~
brutus1213
I am a fan of old history docs. Search for mesopotamia on youtube for a
fascinating one. I also like medieval ones. Check out A history of Britain.
Any recs on your side? No aliens pls :)

------
rc-1140
Trying to develop (ha) some web development skills and I was studying
interview questions. I've never done anything web-related outside of making
API calls, so I'm reading "The Little ASP.NET Core Book" by Nate Barbettini. I
appreciate that the author is focusing on presenting the things one needs to
know to do $"{foo}" so far, other materials are either too wordy or are really
childish/tasteless.

I started doing Leetcode several months ago because I wanted to change jobs
soon, but it's really exposing what not having a traditional CS background is
costing me. I feel guilty looking at the answers on there and in Cracking the
Coding Interview but I genuinely don't know how to make things faster. Seeing
some of the answers in CTCI after attempting some of the string related
questions made me ask myself "well, why wasn't that talked about in the
informational section preceding the questions?"

~~~
wenc
For ASP.NET Core check out Pluralsight. Got me up to speed in 2 weeks.

------
john4532452
Learning probability for strong foundation in ML. The books i am following are
"First course in probability by Sheldon Ross" and "Probability and Statistics"
Michael J. Evans and Je¤rey S. Rosenthal

This is the first time i am studying based on the topics rather than following
syllabus. I wanted to understand covariance for calculating similar interest
b/w users to suggest the posts viewed by a user in the app i am developing.
This took me down the rabbit hole and forced to learn everything required to
define covariance. Its talking a lot of time but i feel it's worth it because
now i have a strong foundation. Also its nice to follow more than one book
because i have no attachment to any of the books. When in college i used to
get attached to my notes or the first text book i follow, but studying a topic
from many books have no attachment to either and its liberating.

------
greenyouse
I started hacking on a browser extension to inject source-maps into requests
using HTTP headers this week. It's a dev tools extension which should allow
full source-maps to be used in production sites without the usual comment at
the end of the file. I've never done dev tools browser extensions before so
it's fun to learn about.

------
zests
Computer networking. I’m reading through TCP/IP illustrated.

Also learning about Linux. I used macOS for about a year and thought that I
knew “Linux” but now I’m seeing how far the rabbit hole goes. I installed arch
linux and am currently just customizing it and immersing myself in the
community. Eventually I’ll pick up a systems or operating systems book.

~~~
BenjiWiebe
For playing with both networking and Linux, you should really look into dn42.
It's pretty much an internet sandbox.

------
conroy
SQL.

I'm writing a compiler for SQL that parses DDL (CREATE TABLE, etc.) and
queries and outputs type-safe Go. It currently supports PostgreSQL, but the
plan is to support more engines and more output programming languages.

[https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc](https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc)

------
tluyben2
I am trying to understanding more about why programming is so complex (it is
some kind of calling after 25+ years of programming). I am doing this learning
via working on projects in a diverse range of technologies (asp.net with c# &
f#, js & typescript & purescript + node, js + typescript + react(native),
haskell and clojure) and by working on proofs in tla+/agda/idris.

My paid work is currently (inherited projects in) c#, so I try to mix
environments by experimenting (and studying the runtimes / compilers at the
same time) with little tools/libs [0] (not for production, but I keep
wondering if there are ways to bring things that help me from in language A to
language B).

[0]
[https://github.com/tluyben/PoorMansRefinementTypes](https://github.com/tluyben/PoorMansRefinementTypes)

------
bamboozled
Basic Math and Pre-Alebra.

I'm learning it in a way where I actually understand how things work rather
than just the way I was blindly taught in high-school.

Sounds boring but it's pretty interesting.

------
tomduncalf
Started working through the Coursera Machine Learning course By Andrew Ng.
I’ve always wanted to understand ML better, and this seemed like the ideal
opportunity to actually do it, especially as I might have some work coming up
using ML.

So far, I’m very impressed, very clear presentation style and he does a good
job of explaining the fundamentals and maths (which is good as I’m pretty
rusty at maths!) while still keeping it fairly concise - my main issue with
learning from video is often that it “waffles” a lot and I could get the same
knowledge from text much quicker, but it doesn’t feel like that here.

I may switch to the deep learning specialisation or try to get my hands dirty
with a more hands-on course after I understand the basic concepts but we will
see, I’m actually enjoying relearning some maths more than I expected to!

~~~
aashu_dwivedi
The assignments in the old course are in matlab. There are also unofficial
assignments available in python. They can also be submitted for grades in
coursera. You might want to have a look at them.

~~~
tomduncalf
Good tip, thank you!

------
Nabi
Audio programming and all jungles surrounding it - C++, plugin frameworks,
Fourier transform, filters design etc. Step by step, often hard but also
rewarding.

~~~
CameronNemo
You might be interested to check out sushi, which is a headless DAW written in
C++.

~~~
Nabi
Thanks! Haven’t heard about it before, will check. Although I’v heard about
Elk - looks like by the same guys. Recently started playing around with Bela
as it has Eurorack kits.

------
Havoc
HTML/React/JS. Amateur hour I know, but all my previous efforts have been
compiled code not web

------
akirakurusu
Cantonese - it is an incredibly rich language with tons of regional
differences, slang, and history spanning thousands of years, way more rich
than modern Mandarin. The fact that it has fewer resources online to learn it
has made me more resourceful at finding good books, academic grammar articles,
and has gotten me deep into HK pop culture. I'm a native romance language
speaker and Cantonese is so fundamentally different in its structure than my
language it is a joy to learn. Unfortunately, the CCP is constantly cracking
down on the language, with a very political campaign to dismiss it as a
"dialect" despite it being mutually unintelligible with Mandarin and having
its own independent history.

~~~
qeng-ho
I'm curious; are you studying Cantonese or Taishanese or some other variant?
Asking simply because Cantonese is pretty mutually intelligible with Mandarin;
I'm a native Mandarin and Cantonese speaker and barring some vocabulary (and
pronunciation which is often just slightly "off-sounding" Mandarin), they're
almost identical.

~~~
akirakurusu
Been studying standard HK Cantonese for almost 2 years at this point, can
understand a wide variety of written Cantonese, news, stories, but cannot even
read a basic mandarin sentence I see on wechat. Cantonese having 6 tones (with
9 in some regional variants). There are over 2200 different syllables in
Cantonese, more than twice the number in Mandarin:
[https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-
languages/Standard-...](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-
languages/Standard-Cantonese).

I'd argue the majority of daily vocabulary is completely different, both in
writing and in pronunciation, than its mandarin counterpart, such as some of
the most commonly used words 而家，頭先，邊個，喺唔喺係，佢哋，講，有冇，點解，佢同佢講，畀 as in
我講畀佢聽，聽日，尋日，嗰陣時，嗰個，嗰啲， I could go on and on. Even after all this time, I
didn't know the characters 是 or 哪里 until learning them a few weeks ago.
Likewise, if I were a native mandarin speaker and heard the relatively simple,
common sentence 佢哋而家喺邊度呀 spoken to me, I would understand exactly 0% of it.
Grammar is significantly different with word placement, nuance of ending
particles, usage of adverbial comparisons using Noun + V + 得 + 過 + Noun, using
畀，未。。。添, etc. I cannot understand a shred of mandarin when spoken to me,
despite being able to communicate conversationally and understand most of
spoken Cantonese from others.
[https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1211](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1211).
There are varieties of sources analyzing the etymology of words in sinitic
languages as well as their grammar structures and phonologies. Both languages
are far from being mutually intelligible for monolingual speakers. Perhaps
being a native speaker in both has allowed you to have a comprehensive mental-
map of their isomorphisms.

------
math
rust. the ownership system it embodies seems important and I want to
understand it deeply. also, the language has momentum.

------
jakeinspace
Getting back into regular guitar practice (mostly classical). Also trying to
broaden my musical horizons a bit: playing around with some virtual synths and
my analog synth. I'm currently shopping for a hollow body or solid body
electric guitar and amp, since I want to start getting into blues guitar.
Hoping that I can meld some of the music production/synth stuff with guitar
practice by laying down some backing synth+beat tracks and recording some
guitar licks on top, hoping my little preamp buffer sounds okay.

I'm also starting a Coursera course in audio signal processing. Lets me
scratch the technical itch a bit while not distracting from music. My goal for
later this year is to build a guitar pedal or 2 from scratch.

~~~
zuppy
Just ordered my first guitar and audio interface yesterday. Any tips for
really starting from 0? I will be looking for some online courses, but there’s
so much information online that it is hard for me to find out which is good
for absolute beginners and which is not.

~~~
colkassad
Not sure what exists out there, I started over 25 years ago. A good first step
is to learn chords, starting with major and minor versions of each chord. Get
comfortable switching between them. This is where most people quit as a lot of
chords are not friendly to untrained fingers.

What can help with this is a concept called the "1, 4, 5" rule (it's actually
called the I, IV, V rule but let's keep it simple). Basically, you start in a
key, say the key of A, assign that to 1. The 4th and 5th chords from that
starting chord always sound good with the 1st. So for the key of A, the 4th
and 5th are D and E. Notes start over after G, so if 4 and 5 go past, like
with G, you start over at A. In the key of G, the 4th and 5th are C and D
respectively, for example. This is at the heart of blues music. For me, the
easiest three-chord progression for my fingers to learn was G, C, and D.

There are a lot of little "rules" like that in music theory and it can be fun
to learn them and experiment. If you find that you are really getting into it,
I recommend dropping $300 or so on a decent acoustic guitar. There is
something to be said about an instrument you can just pick up and play and not
have to worry about wires and interfaces.

~~~
zuppy
thank you very much (to you and to all others who replied). i went with an
electric guitar as it will allow me to play during the night, without
bothering neighbours. when i will get better i would love an acoustic,
especially for flamenco.

------
_prototype_
Web app development using clojure/clojurescript. Also learning clojure itself.
So far its been an absolute joy/blast. I'm really wanting to use this
professionally but the amount of jobs using this tech stack is incredibly non
existent.

Hopefully that changes soon

~~~
danpli
If you happen to get stuck on setting up a ClojureScript dev environment (like
I did when starting out with the official docs), check out this write-up:
[https://danplisetsky.github.io/posts/2020-03-26-getting-
star...](https://danplisetsky.github.io/posts/2020-03-26-getting-started-with-
clojurescript/)

~~~
_prototype_
Excellent, thanks for the link!

------
erikpl
Doing this part-time studying + working thing right now, finishing up my first
year of Informatics/CS after changing my major.

For school, I'm learning networking. Finding it a bit dry, especially learning
about packet structures and such. The book we're using, "Computer Networking:
A Top-Down Approach" by Kurose & Ross[1] is great and the authors'
personalities really shine through!

For work I'm learning about databases and how to gain access to it from a web
app. The world of databases (specifically PostgreSQL) and SQL is entirely new
to me. Currently trying to figure out how to best connect my Flask app with my
Postgres DB.

Currently learning Rust whenever I have the time/motivation. It's a great
language with some really clever design choices, but it's a pain in the ass to
learn, especially without experience with lower-level languages. The
incredible amount of other cool languages, such as Clojure and Elixir, can
make it hard to stay focused!

Also been meaning to get into vector graphics (Affinity Designer[2] is on sale
right now) and philosophy, but you know...the usual excuses. Honestly, the
incredible amount of CS-related topics I know nothing about, including some
really basic ones, makes it hard to study anything else out of sheer guilt.

As for philosophy, if anyone are curious, a book that was recommended to me by
a philosophy major buddy is "The Problems of Philosophy" by Bertrand
Russell[3].

[1] [https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/computer-networking-a-top-
down...](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/computer-networking-a-top-down-
approach_james-f-kurose_keith-w-ross/260997/#isbn=0136079679&idiq=3908544) [2]
[https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/](https://affinity.serif.com/en-
gb/designer/) [3] [https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-problems-of-
philosophy_ber...](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-problems-of-
philosophy_bertrand-russell/286828/#isbn=1534863443&idiq=36978058)

------
jacobedawson
I'm doing Harvard's CS50 (2020) and working through Steven Cochan's
Programming in C (4th edition) alongside it. Coming from a JavaScript / front-
end background learning about pointers and manual memory management is eye-
opening.

------
_nothing
The Trickeration Routine, a solo jazz routine by the late Norma Miller, one of
the original Whitey's Lindy Hoppers from the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. It's
one of the harder group routines out there because unlike the very popular
Shim Sham[1], there are no repeating sections.

Also just started trying to learn Svelte today. And I'm about to jump on the
breadmaking bandwagon.

Video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIhi4BuDSf4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIhi4BuDSf4)

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF9WmOlO4ww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF9WmOlO4ww)

------
cs702
* Learning and building a more intuitive understanding of Projective Geometric Algebra (PGA). Looks _very_ disruptive for all kinds of computer graphics applications. PGA replaces the use of Vectors, Quaternions, Dual Quaternions, and the entire machinery of Linear Algebra with a single unified, elegant framework that "just works." Feels a bit like magic.

* Exploring and playing with new capsule routing algorithms in deep learning models for vision and language tasks. Particularly intrigued by routing algorithms in which output capsules seek to "explain" (generate/predict) their input data (e.g., EM matrix routing, Heinsen routing).

~~~
adamnemecek
Enki (the speaker in the video you posted below) is running a community called
bivector for all GA people

[https://bivector.net/](https://bivector.net/).

Join the discord [https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk](https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk).

Check out a demo [https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated-
orbits](https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated-orbits)

~~~
cs702
Yes. These links are shown in the video :-)

------
curiousigor
Trying to learn or build my skill around music production with Ableton. I've
been in a alternative metal band for almost 8 years, but electronic music has
always interested me since I have quite a few ideas in regards to melody and
stuff like that (I'm the singer in my band).

I just applied to a course from Berkeley trough Corusera, and they are really
great, but I'm not trying to rush trough, as this is my main way of trying to
learn, making me lose interest because of the overflow of information.

If anyone has any good books, courses or tutorials on this, that would be a
great help too :)

------
ojosilva
Learning how to sing.

Our voices are a beautiful, natural instrument we carry everywhere with us,
from the shower to lonely business trips to walks in the park. I've always had
the desire to put it to work. Singing is also an ancient tradition of bringing
melody and lyrics to people. For me it's not about singing like a soul or
blues singer (ie Joe Cocker) but more like Chet Baker: get the notes right
(pitch) and building them into elegant phrasing, which needs control of tempo
and great diaphragm training. Music is undeniably great for your brain, which
can include learning and memorizing a ton of lyrics, tempo and pitch. As an
art also very appreciated by most people, who really feel grateful by a (good)
vocal performance, sometimes more than by any other instrument. Hearing
yourself improve and sing well gives a high dose of happiness and confidence
builder.

It's also an excellent breathing and speaking exercise, which increases your
ability to communicate effectively, projecting and modulating your voice
effortlessly and making it easier to jump in into a conversation. Also gives
your voice the stability to fend off your nerves or anxiety. For an introvert
like me it's definitely a very effective tool, it makes me feel like "in the
matrix" as far as speaking goes, as my brain thinks ahead of time or just in
time, so my mind feels snappier. In other words, I feel like a more
spontaneous person since I've started to sing.

~~~
kkleindev
Would you mind sharing how you 'learn'?

~~~
fluroblue
Not op though I’ve been doing it for a while now. A crap ton of scales and
exercises. Lots of work to develop the many muscles in that area as well as
teaching them how to coordinate together.

------
garfieldnate
I've always had an interest in computer graphics, but never studied it in
school. I found Jamis Buck's _The Ray Tracer Challenge_[1] and got totally
hooked on creating a ray tracer. The book walks you through creating
_everything_ from scratch, starting with matrix multiplication all the way up
through reflection/refraction and rendering (a useful subset of) OBJ files.
The book gives you test cases in cucumber one at a time, and when the tests
pass you have a new feature! It's super addicting. I've been learning Rust
while going through it, too (repo: [2]). There's a forum associated with the
book where people share images they've created and ask for help, and it's fun
to see what other people have tried or what languages they're trying to learn
while going through the book.

I've enjoyed learning a programming language at the same time as learning an
interesting subject so much that I plan on repeating it!

[1] [http://raytracerchallenge.com/](http://raytracerchallenge.com/) [2]
[https://github.com/garfieldnate/ray_tracer_challenge](https://github.com/garfieldnate/ray_tracer_challenge)

------
AnyTimeTraveler
I'm a informatics student and am currently studying online. My focus is on
embedded programming and I am currently working on a side-job, where I program
an embedded device that is going to act as a wildlife deterrent to protect
deer from ending up in wheat fields that are about to be harvested.

I have many hobby projects next to that and can never finish any of those, but
they are also only motivated by 'oh that might a cool thing'. I have not yet
found a side project which solves a problem big enough to motivate me to
actually finish it.

------
dschadd
Cybersecurity! I just started on Hack The Box. I am not sure if I want to go
all the way for OSCP. Regardless, it is really fun and I've always wanted to
learn how to "hack".

------
thomashobohm
I'm still in school and am just starting to get into more difficult math;
right now I'm learning introductory odes, vector calculus, and introductory
analysis. All three are really enjoyable, but in some ways vector calculus and
differential equations feel like a review, in that the hardest part of each is
just the calculus I've forgotten since Calculus I-III. I find analysis to be
the most interesting course because of how novel it is. I remember at the
start of the semester, it was so confusing; the concepts weren't difficult to
grasp, but I just didn't understand why we were learning what we were
learning, or what it had to do with calculus, for which we were supposedly
trying to develop some theoretical foundation. But as the weeks went on, I
began to appreciate the beauty of the subject, in small increments. I began to
understand why the real numbers were constructed just so, and why we needed to
understand ideas like compactness before we could talk about ideas like
convergence.

One quote about analysis that I read online somewhere is that you should study
it until it starts to feel "natural." At the time, I guess it sounded true,
but I didn't appreciate what it actually meant. Now, I'm starting to.

It takes a lot of effort to digest each new lecture, but I'm excited to see
what the rest of the course holds, and to graduate to "real analysis"
afterwards.

------
davidwparker
1\. Woodworking / carpentry. Making custom slide out shelves for our pantry.
2\. Flutter. Love it. 3\. Cooking (I know how to cook already, but want to
level up)- via Masterclass and a few books.

------
formalsystem
Video editing (Adobe Premiere Pro + After Effects) and Video streaming (OBS +
Twitch).

I figure it's gonna be a while before we get back to normal. People will
continue to crave attention and video is a more scalable way to disseminate
your knowledge vs traditional meetings or Zoom calls.

I'm specifically looking at doing more analytical video game streams and
educational Machine Learning content for the advanced n00bs.

Who we view as charismatic will change quite a bit in the near future since we
can endlessly edit and improve our message before we share it with others.

------
dokka
I bought the cheapest trumpet on ebay($65) and I'm learning the trumpet. It's
a lot of fun. I'm slightly annoyed that I'm not programming as much, but this
is fun too

------
ublaze
I'm learning how to do web development again. I've only been working on
infrastructure tools/services at my job, and I'm re-learning concepts like how
to authenticate users, and my first time seriously using React, Django and
Typescript.

My project is a hosted blog platform where you can edit a Google doc & publish
it as a blog post, which is useful for publishing rich blog posts with tables,
while keeping features like review/collaboration, tracking changes etc.

~~~
edwinyzh
Hey! Mine ([https://docxmanager.com](https://docxmanager.com)) is similar but
for Microsoft Word on Windows :)

~~~
ublaze
Super cool! That looks professional. I have a landing page up for people
interested in the idea and want updates -
[https://simpleblog.io/](https://simpleblog.io/)

~~~
edwinyzh
Great! I wish you will be success with your project.

------
madmax108
The current COVID scene has given me a new sense of what I want to be
learning, and I'm using the enthusiasm to pick up a few things that have been
on my bucket list for a while now:

I'm learning:

\- Spanish with Duolingo

Visited Spain last year for a few weeks. Loved the people, the culture and the
food. And really really wanted to pick up a new language.

\- Music production/mixing with Ableton Live

This has been something I've wanted to play with for a very long time, and
thankfully there are so many resources on the internet to get started. Music
has always been a constant part of my life, and production is basically coding
with notes and sounds! :)

\- Just started getting my beak wet with investing in the stock market

I've always been skeptical of investing my $$$ in the stock market, more so
being the first generation in my family earning enough to afford (what my
parents would call) "luxuries". But I want to be more invested (literally and
figuratively) in making my money work for me. Thankfully, have built up more
savings than I need for years and given the stock market scene right now, it
feels like the right time to dip my feet in for the long term.

I dunno how much of this will last over the next few months, especially once
we start going back to office to work (I'm a person who LOVES going to office
even though we have unlimited WFH), but one can hope! :)

------
kristopolous
The business side: How do you find your customers, position a product, and
create demand. What about new markets, segmentation, downstream and upstream?

Bad technology that gets this part right almost always does phenomenally,
astoundingly, inconceivably better than great technology that gets it wrong.

I'm tired of building things that only I and a few people really like, like
some underground band only a few people know. It's nonsense, I gotta learn how
to do the human part better.

~~~
jlelonm
What are some resources you’re using to learn that stuff?

~~~
kristopolous
Here's some books

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

[https://www.davidow.com/books/marketing-high-
technology/](https://www.davidow.com/books/marketing-high-technology/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-
Blank/dp/09...](https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-
Blank/dp/0989200507)

Each of those books are projects (the order I put them in is more or less
recommended) ... that's probably a couple months of careful study.

If you want to intersperse it with light reading, the following non-fiction
novels are really good examples of the principles in practice (in not always
obvious ways):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine)

You can get used copies on ebay for about $3 each.

Thoughtfully engaging with the material is likely worth 1,000 times that.

Also the commonly cited Reid Hoffman, Seth Godin and Peter Thiel books I think
are mostly a waste of time. Al Ries is ok (and quick) and Jim Collins is good
if you're trying to turn around a 5,000 person company, but oh, if only I was
so lucky.

Anyway, if you want to come back after reading those, I can give additional
recommendations

------
pezo1919
Learning about health and covid to maximize chances of survival of me (27) and
my parents (53).

------
dade_
[https://www.fast.ai/](https://www.fast.ai/) Practical deep learning for
coders. Also Synapse Matrix homeserver.

------
withinboredom
I've been trying to build real systems with Microsoft's Durable Functions.
I've been utterly fascinated by the patterns that have emerged on some of
them.

~~~
w3mmpp
What are those patterns? I've used Azure functions a lot but never had (I
think) a use case for durable ones.

~~~
withinboredom
I’ve come up with the following:

Watchdog Pattern: A orchestration needs to succeed. A watchdog entity checks
up on it to make sure that failures are reported and dealt with appropriately
(ie, refunding a payment if it fails catastrophically)

Circuit Breakers: Polly has their own implementation, but I found it easy
enough to implement my own (don’t recommend in production, just use Polly)

No database: it’s a bit slow to get things done, but it’s amazing to create
entities that don’t need to store state in a database. Paired with the watch
dog pattern or preloading, you can have entities running “in memory” which may
be faster than a dB lookup or the data could be projected to a db for
analysis. I’ve been exploring this most recently.

Aggregate entities: these just count things, or store references to important
entities that they count. This works amazingly well instead of COUNT DISTINCT
queries.

------
nukeu666
German, should lower the barrier to emigrate

~~~
CalRobert
From where are you emigrating?

It's not Germany, but if you happen to be from the US the Dutch American
Friendship Treaty is worth a look. Relatively attainable bar, especially for
people in tech.

~~~
nukeu666
India, most migrations happen through intra-company transfers but that's not
going to happen in a small startup where I work right now

------
sarabande
I'm trying to learn advanced Mandarin (while not living in PRC/Taiwan). I've
bought some business Mandarin books whose content I wouldn't have sought out:
international trade, shipping, etc.; I come from a tech background.

Surprisingly, logistics (and the Mandarin around it) is interesting! Going
through some of the "Incoterms" now. It's fun to learn something new and a
language at the same time.

~~~
indecisive_user
What are some of the resources you used to get to your current competency? I
took classes back in college so I have _some_ understanding, but I'd love to
get to a conversational proficiency.

------
jpgvm
I've 2 main things going right now. IRL I am working on my culinary skills.
Cooking has always been my passion but doesn't pay bills hence I write code.
Been mostly working basics, learning proper knife skills, focusing on doing
recipes from scratch and experimenting a bit to gain intuition about how
things like emulsification work.

On the code side I am building a logs database in Rust. I have previous
experience building databases and in particular time series databases so most
of the learning here is mostly about Rust which I have used before but not for
this type of project. Also getting deeper into regular expressions, query
languages (parsing/lexing/AST) and query optimisation than I have in the past.

Rust is growing on me more than it did in the past. I think a) because it's a
much better language than it was when I used it previously and b) my
experiences since I worked with it last have garnered me more respect for it's
design decisions and type system.

Feeling like I am learning lots of stuff right now despite being trapped
inside so that is good. :)

------
Schwolop
I design board games for fun and unrealistic dreams of making entire hundreds
of dollars. But the part I suck at is making art and iconography. So I'm
spending some time learning how to drive GIMP and Inkscape. Just this week I
have completely finished the game I've been working on for six months now:
[http://www.drtomallen.com/half-the-
battle.html](http://www.drtomallen.com/half-the-battle.html) (unfortunately
the manufacturer is in lock-down, so the only option to play it is to print
your own...)

I'm still awful at it, but I can now manipulate art from other sources fairly
comfortably. And I'm at a point where I can make geometric types of shapes and
patterns easily enough from scratch. It's already enough that I look at logos
and things differently now, to see how I would go about building them in these
tools.

Unfortunately, I still dislike this aspect of game design compared to the fun
of lying in a hammock and run thought experiments on the actual gameplay
systems!

------
colinjoy
awk.

One too many times have I though to myself that a just little bit of awk might
go a long way to help with extracting information from a pile of data.

Now working my way through _Effective awk programming_. So far, no regrets.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/index.htm...](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/index.html#SEC_Contents)

------
thomas
Been spending a lot of my time geeking out about fountain pens. Shocking
amounts of information out there! Like this cartridge guide
[https://unsharpen.com/fountain-pen-cartridge-
guide/](https://unsharpen.com/fountain-pen-cartridge-guide/)

Also learning about email parsing. Not something I had thought about before
but there is a lot to learn and lots of edge cases.

------
inetsee
I've been meaning to try and learn Lojban for quite a while. Now that almost
all of my distractions are shut down for the forseeable future, maybe I'll be
able to make some progress. I have acquired copies of "English Through
Pictures" by I. A. Richards, and I thought I'd do something similar, only for
Lojban. If I do make significant progress with that, maybe I'll post it
somewhere.

------
tartoran
Im learning Scheme/Racket. I started from HTDP and moving on from there, so
far I am loving it, havent been this excited in a while. I am also ramping up
on F# and the community is growing and quite nice. I recommend Scott
Wlaschin’s Domain Modleling in F# and his website fsharpforfunandprofit.

I am learning Latin and Spanish on Duolingo but thats more at the hobby level,
about 10 min a day.

------
jefftk
I'm learning how electronic music works and trying to merge it with the kinds
of live music I've mostly played before. Sort of like, if someone were
inventing the organ now, what would they do? Here's where I am so far:
[https://www.jefftk.com/p/rhythm-stage-
setup-v3](https://www.jefftk.com/p/rhythm-stage-setup-v3)

------
rayxi271828
Probably old news to most here, but: Systems Thinking. Am finishing Donella
Meadows book and interested in going deeper into this particular rabbit hole.

Also, related, found this in Coursera while looking for courses on Systems
Thinking: Big History ([https://www.coursera.org/learn/big-
history](https://www.coursera.org/learn/big-history))

------
nihilazo
I'm learning sewing! It's very far off usual HN things but it's nice to do
something completely different to what you usually do.

------
truebosko
I'm learning how to build 3d environments using three.js, specifically react-
three-fiber

Fun way to jump back into React while also learning new concepts!

------
funfunfunction
How to solve the rubrik’s cube that’s been sitting on my desk for three years.

------
cushychicken
I've had a lot of fun learning offshoots from the function generator I'm
working on building. ([http://cushychicken.github.io/bfunc-
quickstart/](http://cushychicken.github.io/bfunc-quickstart/) if interested.)

\- Started learning about building versioning into firmware. Found some great
posts from the Memfault Interrupt blog on GNU build IDs, and another one from
the Embedded Artistry blog on adding more generic versioning.

\- Also learning about analog drivers and generic analog design techniques
from designing the output stage of the next board revision.

\- Learning the most from building prototypes and selling them to people. It's
given me a crash course in writing good, useful docs, and getting people up to
speed quickly.

If you want to get involved, there's definitely more boards, and plenty of
stuff to be done. Feel free to email me at <hn_username> at gmail dot com to
see about arranging a board for you!

------
aklemm
How to run as much Fediverse and and IndieWeb software as I can. I want to
understand the entire scope of what is possible today for a fully personal
federated cloud, homepage, and social network. Along the way I want to
understand what holes there may be and what approaches could bring more people
onboard.

So far I’m having success and fun with Pleroma and Matrix.

------
simonw
Spanish and how to play the guitar.

------
verandaguy
Norwegian!

Originally, I was going to do a hiking and photography tour of Fennoscandia in
the Fall. I'm not sure if that'll still come to pass with the ever-looming
collapse of society, but at least it's pretty refreshing to learn a new (non-
programming) language for the first time in over a decade, and for the first
time in my adult life.

~~~
erikpl
I am a native Norwegian speaker! How is it going so far?

~~~
verandaguy
I'm slowly going through the Duolingo tree :)

Went into it with pretty much zero knowledge of the language, and the thing
that caught me most off-guard were some of the non-phonetic spellings, like
_jeg_ and _kjøpper_, but else the actual grammar is similar enough to English
that it's not causing too many issues!

------
nfrankel
Upping my game on Big Data (and incidentally ML) in the Cloud with "Google
Cloud Platform Big Data and Machine Learning Fundamentals"
([https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/skill/big-data-
foundations](https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/skill/big-data-foundations))

------
jiux
My 6 year old daughter and I are building a quadruped walking cat robot. We
are both learning a lot of new concepts as we go.

Our robot is not operational yet, so I will include a YouTube link below of
the creator with a couple of his own completed “cats”.

[https://youtu.be/OrYmIbtmmJI](https://youtu.be/OrYmIbtmmJI)

------
sneak
Did a deep dive on go templating systems to start adding more frontend web
interfaces to my projects beyond simple json apis.

Settled on pongo2, which has django-style multiple inheritance, which is IMO
essential to keeping an html template hierarchy organized.

With it, I’m writing an ActivityPub spider (code is messy and not fully
organized yet):

[https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/feta](https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/feta)

and also an HN transparency tool that highlights things for me to read that
get nuked from the frontpage:

[https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/orangesite](https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/orangesite)
(live at [https://orangesite.sneak.cloud](https://orangesite.sneak.cloud) )

Next up: rust. I have about 4 go projects I want to finish first, and having a
good templating system means they will be somewhat polished when I shelve
them.

------
gaze
APL! I wanted something completely nutty that would change my way of thinking.
The characters are kinda fun and you pick them up after really drilling them
for 3 days or so. Then you begin to learn to read trains and things. It’s a
really fun language.

That and I’m learning condensed matter theory from Altland. Can’t recommend
this text highly enough.

------
contingencies
Learning again, albeit temporarily, how not to live like an entrepreneur: it's
pleasant, and my body is thanking me.

------
ebiester
As I have a little time on my hands a few things.

Non-technical: I'm learning to create music to help satisfy my creative side.
I'm starting with the piano, and when I can get to a basic proficiency, I'll
slow down and jump to some voice lessons I bought a while back. Then, I'll put
it together with reaper, using some of what I learned as a teenager.

Technical-Creative: I'm returning to my project to do a deeper dive on what
makes programmers bad, mediocre, good, or great, and creating a track that
others can follow. While I have the framework already, I am trying to learn a
whole set of skills well enough to teach others.

Technical: I'm patching up holes in my EcmaScript ecosystem knowledge. I never
really took the time to truly grok Shadow Dom, the Redux patterns, and the
like, even though I was managing a team who was working in it.

------
dirtybirdnj
Right now I'm learning Gatsby and re-learning React after having done one
project with it and putting it down for 12+ months.

I'm learning how to rebuild my 3d printer for the third(?) time. Each time
something breaks it starts off as blind confusion, and over the weeks I figure
it out and then I feel like a genius when it it works.

I have a business I want to build, and I'm working on estimating what the cost
of the individual items / products are, how long they take, and how long it
really "costs" me. I'm working on fixing up the website and improving it.

I have a wall of post-it notes in different colors I'm using to track all of
this stuff. As a developer I hate time tracking and project management in
general but I'm learning a lot by doing it myself. Progress is slow, but at
least there is progress.

------
Andow
As a native English monolunguist I'm learning Russian.

Rust for a side project I've just started.

Music production techniques and how modular synthesis works.

I also started skateboarding a couple of months ago after around a 8 year
break so I'm getting my flat ground practice on my patio haha (although I'm
taking it easy for obvious reasons)

~~~
mindv0rtex
Let me know if you have any question about Russian (email in profile) :-) And
I am a Rust learner too!

------
blinkingled
Trying to learn some oratory and/or one on one communication skills and not
having much of a clue where to start!

My problems - I feel like I fail to quickly assess the other person and fail
to adjust my communication - so I am either way too technical in the lingo or
way too much of a layman talk that makes it feel like I am being insincere!

I also fail to give up the 'problem solving' angle in communication - like I
have to remind myself constantly that communication is rarely transactional or
a means to an end.

I am realizing what I am missing is that I fail to take interest in other
people and their viewpoints and with some concrete strategies and practice I
could do better.

It's never been a problem as such - the few times it was a problem I managed
to retry and resolve, but I want to bring joy and ease into my in-person
communications.

~~~
gerdesj
Go easy on the sauce and simply listen.

~~~
blinkingled
Yeah - starting to incorporate the listen part but that is leading to awkward
pauses as I listen too much - which is next on my list to tune :D

Jerry rigging this is hard - I think a more relaxed, in the moment and self-
forgiving approach is needed.

------
gerdesj
I'm learning how to keep my employees interested.

We are a small IT consultancy, 20 years books and always had three months loot
in the bank just in case. I could never have predicted this thing but I've
always wanted to sleep at night so insisted on a war chest. Damn I'm boring
but as it turns out boring is quite handy now. We have furloughed (UK) a few
troops. We top up the extra 20%.

The calls on the helpdesk are decreasing but at some point I will need to find
more work for the kids. I see a major programme of updates in the near future.
BIOS, switches etc etc etc ad nauseam. If it fails to move it will be updated.
We do rather a lot of that anyway but to ensure that contracts are fulfilled,
we need to be seen to be doing something.

Any other employers here like to pitch in (be careful for obvious reasons)?

~~~
gcheong
Do you think now would be a good time to explore ideas for productizing any
aspects of your business?

------
tosic
I'm trying to get back into graph drawing [1] while learning to code in rust.
I used to do some experiments in graph drawing a while back for my master
thesis, but lost track. Now with the ACM archive [2] being open i got inspired
to look into this again, even though many of the relevant recent papers would
have been available anyway. Not the classics though.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_drawing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_drawing)

[2] [https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-
access-...](https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-access-
during-covid-19)

------
Lorin
I learned about mutant testing earlier this week (testing your tests by semi-
randomized source code modification).

Cool talk about the subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNMBOj7JUPs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNMBOj7JUPs)

------
namaljayathunga
As my company is going to build a prediction app, I'm Currently learning Data
Science, Big Data, Python and Sever Scaling. Because of the Corona situation,
I'm currently working at Home. So, I have time to learn more, however, It is
boring to learn while home.

------
jlarocco
I enjoy learning, so I try to learn new things as part of my day to day
routine to keep things interesting.

I just started following OCW's Finance Theory class and I'm starting to read
the text book on corporate finance and watching a lecture a day during lunch.
I've always been interested in economics, so this is just learning for
learning's sake. [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-
management/15-40...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-
management/15-401-finance-theory-i-fall-2008/)

I'm just about done reading "A Look at Boulder: From Settlement to City,"
about the history of Boulder County, CO. Again, in this case I'm interested in
local history, so I'm just reading it before bed for fun.

Two weeks ago I installed FreeBSD on a spare hard drive, and I've been reading
through the handbook and learning how to do various tasks as they come up.

I'm writing a Spotify client in Common Lisp, so I'm learning about the Spotify
API and architecture. The beginnings of the library are on Github, but right
now it's really just a utility library for making API calls, and not much of a
client. This started as the thought, "It'd be neat to have a library to
control Spotify from the REPL," and is turning into a full client because
spotify-tui is the only client I can find on FreeBSD.
[https://github.com/jl2/cl-spotify/](https://github.com/jl2/cl-spotify/)

At work I've been helping the test team write functional tests for some
Windows software, which I haven't used in years, so the past week I was re-
learning "just enough" about Windows and Python's win32com library, and
learning about AutoIt for the first time.

I've been learning to track stand on my bike - it's something to do during
stoplights.

And I impulse bought a pot roast on Friday, so today or tomorrow I'm going to
learn how to cook one.

------
asdfzalsd
Reading various biographies!

Some of the books on my list are: The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí Doctor
Goebbels: His Life and Death I, Claudius by Robert Graves The Agony and the
Ecstasy Lust for Life Carl Jung Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Stephen King
- On Writing

------
tomnj
Haskell and compilers at the same time! Following Appel’s awesome Modern
Compiler Implementation in ML:
[https://github.com/tdp2110/HaskellTiger](https://github.com/tdp2110/HaskellTiger)

------
Cthulhu_
I got a new job not long ago which has given me a lot of time to both learn
and come up with a new application; I'm learning a couple things on-the-job:

    
    
      - Go & its entire ecosystem
      - Packaging & deployment via RPM
      - Layout & design a web ui (this was done by someone else in my previous jobs)
      - Personal project management (I'm a one-man team atm)
      - Code generation via Swagger
      - Architecture & technology choices and documenting them as I go
      - Working from home full-time (not by choice) and staying productive
      - Warhammer 40K <_<

------
stevekemp
Currently hacking up a prototype of a puppet-like system for automating host
setup.

So far I can parse a configuration file, apply rules, handle (manually
specified) dependencies, and configure triggers to run on rule-actions.

Not a bad state to be in for a few hours work. Of course the big decision is
if I continue, and write modules for doing more than I have right now. I
suspect the rational answer should be "no". But I kinda like the existing
implementation, and being go it is trivial to install/deploy.

[https://github.com/skx/marionette/](https://github.com/skx/marionette/)

------
selfish-duck
GraphQL (advanced). Already been using it for 4 years now (yes back when there
was no tooling nor best practices) but I decided to go further in the schema
design thinking and bought Production-Ready GraphQL to help with it. Strongly
recommend the book as it goes quite deep on the subject.

Also experimenting with my 4th home-brewed beer.

"Soft skill"-wise I spend time helping people with good (so I hope) advice and
recommendations and a bit of interview mentoring to enter the software
development industry. Makes you learn a lot about yourself and how you can
motivate and help people big time with only a tiny amount of your time and
energy, just sharing stuff you know.

------
kevstev
I have always felt I have not really understood things from the bottom up in
terms of CS- like how do we really get from bits to software? I have been
building Ben Eater's 6502 computer, which has been mostly enjoyable
(cutting/stripping wires and getting them into the exact right small little
hole is tedious at best, hurts my back at worst).

I have also been reading Modern Operating Systems by Tanenbaum- though a quite
old edition from the early 200s- wondering if its worth putting on hold until
I can get my hands on a newer edition.

Next up, I'd like to do Ben Eater's 8 bit computer as well as nand2tetris.

------
lappet
I am learning how to get better at writing short stories in April by
participating in Camp Nanowrimo

[https://nanowrimo.org/what-is-camp-nanowrimo](https://nanowrimo.org/what-is-
camp-nanowrimo)

------
woohoo7676
Learning some Vue.js - struggled a bit to get into React (nothing against
React, might try it again later), but I find Vue+Typescript with class
components works well for me as a .NET dev.

Web dev tooling really has come a long way in the past few years!

------
fuddle
I'm learning Rust language, I'm reading through the official Rust book at the
moment. I have to say the book very well written and easy to follow. I'm
looking forward to using Rust full time sometime in the future.

------
znpy
I'm learning LDAP and Oauth2, at the moment.

Learning about directory services is empowering, and stuff like keycloak let
you build your own single-sign-on solution with very little investment (except
for willpower to learn).

------
juped
Studying general relativity, since it's the flagship application of my field
of mathematics (differential geometry) and yet I only know the basics. It is,
of course, the most elegant scientific theory of all time.

~~~
jmeister
I’ve been wanting to ask this a differential geometer - what do you think of
Sussman and Wisdom’s book as a DE intro for an CS/applied math person? Thanks!

[https://www.amazon.com/Functional-Differential-Geometry-
MIT-...](https://www.amazon.com/Functional-Differential-Geometry-MIT-
Press/dp/0262019345)

~~~
juped
Never read it, but the preview pages look pretty neat. I might pick it up for
a fun read. Might want to pair it with something like do Carmo's Differential
Geometry of Curves and Surfaces (which is quite accessible) for the
mathematical side.

~~~
jmeister
Thanks for the recommendation. And yes, the lisp book should be fun. Sussman
is a legendary CS educator.

------
zeouter
Unity & GameDev. After work I'm a bit drained so it's slow but nice.

------
leonfedden
I have been writing an AI for poker playing.

[https://github.com/fedden/pluribus-poker-
AI](https://github.com/fedden/pluribus-poker-AI)

I've been learning about Counter Factural Regret (CFR) and have been using it
to iteratively work towards writing a no limit texas hold'em poker playing AI
agent. It's still in the early stages but seen success with simple forms of
poker such as Kuhn, and have expanded to a form of short deck poker.

I have also been brushing up my web skills by creating a visualiser for the
poker state via Flask and Vue.js

------
noobrunner
I am doing Coursera 'Intro to Genetics & Evolution' and fascinated by it. Have
been in tech for several years doing mostly same old things, so found this a
refreshing change. The instructor is very good

------
rangerranvir
Trying to learn Machine learning and writing about it. Latest post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22786374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22786374)

------
m3kw9
Learning how to read a company’s balance sheet, cash flow, income to see which
are at risk of going under. How the stimulus can save but weaken a company’s
financial structure during these times

~~~
hakanito
Any good resources for that?

------
bartread
Gulp 4 because, grr, excessive breaking changes from 3.9.1.

Also how to fix my car. I'm currently refreshing all the coolant pipes since
once ruptured the other day. It's not that hard, but some of the pipes are
difficult to get to, and I'm procrastinating about disassembling essentially
the entire front end of the vehicle in order to be able to access the radiator
and replace pipes attached to it. I've already replaced the ruptured pipe no
problem but, since all the pipes are the same age, I figure it's only a matter
of time before another splits.

------
lazyjones
Production engineering (I'm an IT guy, mostly retired and dabbling in real
estate, also a Tesla fan, I suppose).

Manufacturing is fascinating and I'd love to own a small factory at some
point, profitable or not!

------
werber
I got a tattoo gun. I’ve wanted to learn since the nineties and I’m loving it.
Dumb, but I did my first one on myself today and it was so satisfying to
accomplish something I’d totally given up on

------
stormtroper1721
I made a list a few weeks ago:

1\. Finish my ml research project 2\. Learn rust 3\. Start a blog 4\. Learn
Lin alg and stats 5\. Go through all of the deep learning book (goodfellow et
al.) 6\. Start working with GANs or RL

from:
[https://twitter.com/stormtroper1721/status/12421529408627220...](https://twitter.com/stormtroper1721/status/1242152940862722053)

Other than that, I'm working on building my own Numpy-like array lib in Rust.
I'd be glad to chat about it if anyone's interested

------
wreath
The mechanics behind the basic barbell movements (working on becoming a
Strength Coach on the side).

I'm about to order tools for leather work as well. I want to make a leather
wallet and a sunglasses case.

------
newbie578
Trying to learn Flutter!

I started learning Android but a lot of people shared their experience and it
just doesn't seem worth it going all in on Android, especially considering
that for most of my projects "native" experience is not a must (i.e. social
app for sharing book opinions (i.e. a Goodreads which doesn't suck).

I am also impressed by the data, Flutter and Dart a growing incredibly, and I
would like to be riding the early waves.

If anyone has any ideas, tips or experiences, please do share!

------
tunesmith
From being an enterprise programmer, I'm try to learn how to scale back and
deploy single-author websites to prod. At work we do modern stuff, but I've
got this 12-year-old LAMP website, a collaborative creative writing site, that
I'm deploying to prod just by logging in to the linode and doing git fetch /
git pull. It feels so wrong but it's so easy. Still too paranoid to make the
site public though, for now it's just me and my friends.

------
38932ur98u
Ukulele/music theory and spanish

------
pankajdoharey
Machine Learning using fast.ai courses i would say they are really good and
fast way for programmers to get onboard without going through all those boring
statistics classes.

~~~
noobrunner
Have heard lot of good stuff about fast.ai courses. I am doing cs231n again.
This time taking my time to understand the math and theory in much more detail

~~~
pankajdoharey
Nice suggestion i might try those once i finish fast.ai

------
openfuture
General topology, Lean and lattice theory.

I am also making steady adjustments to my xmonad configuration so I suppose
I'm also learning haskell and that particular library ecosystem.

------
OldTechSucks
I'm "learning"(calling functions) opencv(using cv2 with python3) to find the
coordinates of a string inside image.

Even though it's useless in the industry:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/axvjfb/do_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/axvjfb/do_industries_prefer_opencv_on_c_or_on_python/)

------
Lazze2k5
WebGL and animations, put together a NPM package to load GLTF files and show
them with animations and materials. Quite tricky to get right but fun.
Planning to use it for a game idea I have.

[https://github.com/larsjarlvik/webgl-
gltf](https://github.com/larsjarlvik/webgl-gltf)

Demo:
[https://larsjarlvik.github.io/?model=robot](https://larsjarlvik.github.io/?model=robot)

------
_Understated_
Signalr.

I built a web based chat site for my family to keep in touch. I'm opening it
up to everyone shortly... next few days I hope

I'm looking to add video calls too.

No libraries, just .NET, HTML and JS

------
gyvastis
I have been fascinated by Machine Learning for a while now but never got
around to it until recently. I have landed on Kaggle almost by accident and
started doing the courses. Loving it! Give it a go. They also have
competitions on different datasets and leaderboards to make it more fun.

[https://www.kaggle.com/learn/overview](https://www.kaggle.com/learn/overview)

------
jjice
I've been reading through Lion's Commentary of Unix V6. Very interesting to
finally understand how multiple processes and scheduling is done, as that was
always a mystery to me. There's a great version where the source and the
commentary are side by side:
[https://warsus.github.io/lions-/](https://warsus.github.io/lions-/)

------
CodeGlitch
Janani Ravi's Machine Learning course on PluralSight[1]

It's using scikit-learn, which I've been meaning to pick-up for awhile. Other
than that, learning how to use the ELK stack (ElasticSearch, Kibana) for some
network-traffic analysis stuff I've been meaning to implement.

I think we'll all come out of this period a lot smarter :)

[1] [https://pluralsight.com](https://pluralsight.com)

------
Aweorih
Game development with the unreal engine in combination with 3D modelling in
blender. I'd also like to learn some c++ when I'm more familiar with UE. While
using blender I discovered that you can script there with python which was
also on my long todo list. It's a bit slow since so much at once after work
but still a lot of fun. I began to learn this because some friends and I
wanted to make a car racing game.

------
mrwnmonm
Algorithms, wrote just one in the last two years and I know that I won't write
many in the next job, but you know, you have to study it for the interview.

------
dctaflin
Two things: German and Differential Geometry.

German is just because it's fun and it's my best second language by far, so
I'd like to get fully fluent.

Differential Geometry is a diversion from working through _Gravitation_ by
Misner, Thorne, et al. I found I needed more math. Now it has kind of become
an end in itself, however. It's the hardest thing I've studied since college
(which was a _long_ time ago).

------
erwinh
Learning about recommender systems both for work-related activities and
personal interest. I see a lot of people learning hard mathematics or physics
concepts. This is somewhat related to machine learning but also has daily-life
implications as it gives some insight into how these social media platforms
shape their algorithms for building the social feeds or Netflix
recommendations for example :)

------
anfractuosity
I'm working on learning KiCad + FPGAs, I've been making a little PCB, I can
plug into my FPGA board (via a PMOD interface), to drive some WS2812B lighting
strips via VHDL.

I've sent the PCB off to a fab, who will do the SMD assembly part too for me
:) Will be a couple of weeks before it arrives I think.

I need to work on an SPI interface next in VHDL which will need to interface
with BRAM which will act as the 'framebuffer'.

~~~
shock
I've recently started learning KiCad too. Which fab did you send your PCB to?

~~~
anfractuosity
I used JLCPCB, it cost around £20 for 5 boards with the assembly (it's
definitely cheaper without assembly), my board is pretty simple assembly-wise,
a level converter, resistors, capacitors and diodes.

Re. kicad, I played with the push and shove routing feature for my board,
which I found really nifty.

------
aaron-santos
I'm porting Rodrigo Pombo's wonderful Build your own React[1] code to
Clojure(script). It really helps understand what's going on under the hood.
The goal is to replace a half-assed React-like implementation I currently have
with something that works much better.

[1] [https://pomb.us/build-your-own-react/](https://pomb.us/build-your-own-
react/)

~~~
johnbellone
I’ve been looking for a good real world project that uses Clojure to learn.
I’ve only written basic backend services with it but love it.

~~~
aaron-santos
I got hooked on Overtone and then switched over to hacking on a roguelike in
Clojure. It's a fantastic language. :)

~~~
johnbellone
Protojure is a project I’ve been following that is promising. I need a few
hours to write some protobufs and test out a skeleton. But I haven’t done too
much frontend development with Clojurescript. Am definitely interested in
working on that.

------
adnauseum
I'm continuing to study graph theory and learning Lisp via Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs (with the original 1986 lectures).

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
Lots of joy ahead! Love those lectures.

~~~
brutus1213
Are those online somewhere?

------
snarfy
Synthesizers and modular synths.

~~~
whitehouse3
I bought Omnisphere and a 25-key MIDI controller yesterday. I wanted for years
to learn digital music production, but didn’t because I was busy. This
quarantine gave me the chance to dedicate real time to it.

~~~
snarfy
What production software are you trying? I bought a seinberg audio interface
that came with cubase ai, so I've been playing with that. Cubase has come a
long way - I remember when it was new software.

Even before Cubase I remember playing with trackers like fast tracker 2, so I
also bought a copy of Renoise. If you are a programmer you might like making
music with a tracker over a traditional DAW.

~~~
whitehouse3
I bought Reaper after using its unlimited free version for years. My
background is voiceover and podcast recording and Reaper is good for that. I'm
sure it has limits but I haven't reached them yet.

It has a macro interface for scripting and many of their first-class plugins
can bee configured with Javascript.

------
krat0sprakhar
I built an expense tracker app using Flutter a while ago that I've been using
for a year. It has really helped me in understanding where my money is going.
To build it quick, it uses Google Sheets as a backend and BigQuery for running
sql queries over the data. While everything works, it's quite slow so I'm
looking at building the API server with rust warp and sqlite to store all
transactions.

~~~
saha26
How easy are you using flutter to use so far? I have been thinking about
learning about flutter for a long time, but still unsure about how much
support is there in terms of 3rd party libraries, and whether that can hinder
development at some point.

------
joeyjojo
I am learning music production through a course on monthly.com, by Andrew
Huang. I'm learning a lot of cool tricks and have made a lot of progress in my
music production skills so far.

It is challenging though as I am creating my music on a Synthstrom Deluge
instead of a typical DAW. Most of the concepts so far (1 week in) are still
applicable although it requires a bit of creativity to apply certain concepts.

------
raghavankl
Learning React Native, being a backend developer I lost in touch with front
end development. It is interesting to explore this realm of the stack.

------
tta
I’m reading the Raft paper:
[https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf](https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf)

~~~
gsjbjt
Implementing it is the fun part! You might like going through the Raft lab in
MIT's distributed systems course: [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/labs/lab-
raft.html](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/labs/lab-raft.html)

\+ Jon Gjengset's writeup on some of the "gotcha"s:
[https://thesquareplanet.com/blog/students-guide-to-
raft/](https://thesquareplanet.com/blog/students-guide-to-raft/)

~~~
fmonteiro
Nice, I didn't know that course and I noticed that I can follow along the
course, the classes are recorded. Do you think it's something worth investing
to someone interested in distributed systems? The only downside is that I
can't have my lab exercises validated.

~~~
gsjbjt
Yeah, it's an excellent course. That is typically the unfortunate downside of
self-studying courses, but AFAIK the tests aren't that sophisticated - you can
mostly test it yourself just by running the test suite over and over again,
making sure that it _really_ works 100% of the time and not just 98% of the
time (given the nondeterministic nature of distributed systems failures). This
is basically what students would do before submitting their labs, and most
people got a full score if they ran it enough times :P

------
epaga
I've been learning lots about orbital mechanics and rocket science thanks to
Kerbal Space Program. What a sense of accomplishment with each step

* made it to orbit

* flew by the moon

* crash-landed on the moon

* landed on the moon and returned with the stranded astronauts

* landed on Mars (stuck there for now sending back science experiment data)

* flew by Venus + Mercury

* Took a sample of two different asteroids

* Shot a little refueling space station into orbit and successfully docked to it with other ships

------
epoch_100
I've been spending a lot of my time learning about how to do RegEx at scale.
It's a surprisingly fun problem!

The impetus has been a media monitoring side project[0] that I've been trying
to get off the ground. I should probably spend more time learning about
marketing, but I just keep coming back to RegEx optimization.

[0] [https://lensant.com](https://lensant.com)

------
tuckerpo
I bought a used copy of the old dragon compiler book (written by Aho from Bell
Labs and some others). Would like to take a crack at a C compiler.

------
amerkhalid
Game dev. Being trapped inside, nothing is better escape than video games. We
are watching a lot of TV but there are not many shows or movies that get you
jumping off your couch in frustration or excitement like video games do.

So started playing a lot more video games than usual. Got Dreams on PS4 which
ignited my childhood dream of making video games.

Now I am playing with Unity, Unreal, Swift, Xamarin, and more.

------
voodootrucker
I've been learning a combination of data analytics / ML and embedded C++
development, and some protocol reverse engineering and python.

It's a lot of fun after spending years in the web to go back to systems work.
It's still arbitrary and frustrating some times, but for some reason debugging
kernel code seems like more honest work than messing around with webpack
config yet again.

------
hkt
I'm deploying all my self hosted stuff to k8s and setting up with what I need
to sell to other people. I think I've managed to pick a setup which is going
to scale well horizontally which feels pretty good. It's going pretty well so
far, will probably write it up and maybe even look at selling accounts after
the fact. It has been a fun skills update.

------
markus_zhang
Trying to adapt WFH as our team tends to work overtime and WFH simply
compounds it.

On the other hand, trying to figure out what to learn after adaption...

------
vojtamolda
Swift for TensorFlow

[https://www.tensorflow.org/swift/](https://www.tensorflow.org/swift/)

------
pyr0hu
Haven't been able to do some graphics programming with OpenGL so I tried to
dust off my knowledge about that and started putting together a simple 3d
scene with user inputs, animations, sprites, etc. To increase the fun, I also
constrained myself to C99.

I really really like the graphical style of Pokemon Black (3d environment with
2d sprites) so I want to replicate that.

------
lifeformed
I've been reading through Bartosz Milewski's Category Theory for Programmers,
and trying to do all the challenge questions.

[https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-
for-p...](https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-
programmers-the-preface/)

~~~
EduardLev
I’m working on this as well. I found a couple of people who posted their
solutions online, but some of the questions are tricker than others. Wish
there was an answer key!

------
tombert
I decided to learn how to digital paint. Art has always been a blind spot to
me, and while I’ve played with Photoshop and Krita before, I’ve never really
learned how to do art.

I’ve had an idea for a comic series kicking around in my head; I figure if I
really learn how to use a graphics tablet and Krita and some basic and
intermediate art skills it won’t hurt a damn thing.

------
zikani_03
I'm trying to learn Blender for the umpteenth time. Years ago I prefered 3DS
Max for 3D modelling and never put serious effort into learning Blender,
looking to change that this year esp. with the recent UI/UX changes.

As far as programming is concerned; learning how to build Netty servers and
navigating large open source codebases quickly.

------
herbps10
French. I use Anki for building vocabulary, and practice over Skype. The
innerFrench YouTube channel has also been a great resource.

------
tmaly
I am learning how to build a modern computer from parts. I last built one in
2001.

I have been working on a course to teach kids how to learn programming with
Scratch. I want to learn more of the Adobe CC suit to add more effects to my
videos.

I want to learn how I can improve my remote skills to better work with my
team.

------
rmz
* Natural language processing (udacity nanodegree). * Spanish words (duolingo). * Random fields (reading random articles about it :-). * Anonymizing text (side project) * Photography (blogs, videos, and practice [https://500px.com/la3lma](https://500px.com/la3lma))

------
meken
I’m taking a Japanese class right now. Thinking about wanting to get to the
level where I can play video games in Japanese to learn more. I don’t really
play video games anymore because I largely find them a waste of time, but it’s
an intriguing way to get back into them. I found a YouTube channel called
“game grammar” which is really neat.

~~~
dotmanish
Is it an online Japanese class? Which one and what has been your experience?

------
starpilot
Data structures & algorithms, for the first time, because I want to transition
from being a data scientist to a ML engineer.

------
wexomania
I am currently learning about Greedy Meshing and voxel rendering / editing. I
want to make games with my nieces, nephews and younger siblings, and are
currently working on a voxel editor / drawing tool, so that they can make
their own characters and items for the games without having to learn 3d
modeling and animation.

------
Insanity
Since pluralsight is free this month (no affilition), I've decided to take up
some machine learning courses on there.

------
vishnuvis
Trying to learn Photoshop.

Also apart from that working on page speed optimization of website which are
in wordpress.

Testing on this product page ( [https://www.keka.com/hr-
software/](https://www.keka.com/hr-software/) ), earlier it was 7sec, now it's
4.

Hopefully can do a bit to bring it down to 2.

------
wegymoo
I'm learning Go, git (and how to contribute to an opensource project/code with
other people), also learning more about electricity and specifically the
movements of ions. I have trouble finding resources on this though everything
seems to be either really beginner level or way to high level for what I am
looking for.

------
p2detar
I’ve started getting into Go. Looks good so far. Working on a side project,
which is my best way to get into something new.

~~~
_____smurf_____
what are your resources to learn the lang?

~~~
p2detar
I read “Effective Go”[0], but what really helps me is browsing through the
sources of various Go projects and libs in Github. I also keep a tab of Go’s
packages docs open [1]. And of course there’s StackOverflow. In general I
prefer learning from source code rather than books.

0 -
[https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html](https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html)
1 - [https://golang.org/pkg/](https://golang.org/pkg/)

~~~
_spoonman
I’m learning go, too. Check this resource out. [https://quii.gitbook.io/learn-
go-with-tests/](https://quii.gitbook.io/learn-go-with-tests/)

------
prashant93y
I am learning Data Structures and Algorithms, and solving problems on
LeetCode. The goal is to get selected in FAANG.

------
pkghost
I (quixotically) rolled my own uptime monitor with curl and twilio's CLI, and
then wrote a minimal jenkin's clone with a git hook, a little bit of bash, and
systemd: github.com/cameron/push-to-systemd.

My current project also involves learning elm and postgraphile, which is
shaping up to be a wonderful stack.

------
jccalhoun
I'm (slowly) rewriting a userscript I wrote a few years ago by adding in some
niceties. I'm not a programmer so there is a lot of learning going on here. I
also got an apple pencil so I'm learning to draw with it and getting back into
drawing which I haven't done much of in 20 years.

------
jamil7
I've been porting parts of a Swift / iOS app to a shared Kotlin Native /
Multiplatform library and learning more about Android development, I hope to
release an Android version of the my app. I'm also eyeing Flutter and hoping
to try it out in the near future.

------
dnr
Tensorflow (v2), numpy, and related stuff for image processing. I kind of
ignored the whole deep learning revolution, though I had a very basic
understanding of NNs from a long time ago. It's fun to play with, and I'm
getting an intuition for what sorts of problems NNs are likely to help with.

------
paladin314159
Japanese. I took a year of Japanese in college 10 years ago, but never really
followed up on it (other than watching anime). I started up again about 6
months ago and have been impressed by the number of online resources that are
available now to the extent that self-study is easy (motivation aside).

------
notjustanymike
Engineering manager and tech lead here. Today I made banana bread for the
first time and it's delicious!

------
CalRobert
SQLAlchemy.

Old school but I haven't found a better ORM for my use case - though I keep
thinking there's got to be something like an open-source LookML, which is what
I want in the long term.

Also, lime plastering traditional (100+ year old) buildings, and trying to get
a fruit orchard going without rabbits eating the trees.

------
abdullahkhalids
Trying to learn quantum machine learning. I am currently a physics professor,
but considering moving to industry.

------
jakecodes
I’m taking weekends and evening off so I don’t burn out. I’m working on
learning a piano piece by a composer named Kapustin. If you haven’t listen to
him I highly suggest him. Since I got my degree in piano performance, I’ve not
learned any big pieces and I’m excited that I’m finally doing it.

------
fastlearner
I have been purchasing iOS app templates written in modern Swift with Firebase
backend. Reading through the source code and customizing it for a fun project.
Since I am already proficient in backend stuff with Google Cloud this lets me
quickly learn various things involved in app development.

------
brainlessdev
I'm learning how to build a backend for a web app using TypeORM, GraphQL and
Apollo Server. I'm a frontend developer.

Also, I've been toying with OBS Studio to learn how to make more professional
video recordings to showcase applications at work, or bug reproductions,
documentation, etc.

~~~
selfish-duck
Hey, I recommend checking out type-graphql and especially Nexus to work with
GraphQL on server-side. If you want to go serious about GraphQL I also
recommend reading Production-ready GraphQL. I've been working with gql for 4
years now but this book really deepened how I think about modelling my
schemas, queries and mutations.

All the best on your learning journey!

~~~
brainlessdev
Thank you! In fact I have been using type-graphql for this project.

I'll make a note to check out Nexus. Some other contenders to go into my tech
stack were Hasura, Prisma and Postgraphile, but I wanted something a little
bit closer to the vanilla GraphQL experience...

~~~
selfish-duck
Agree with you. The more vanilla GraphQL you go in the beginning, the more
you'll be able to choose abstraction you want on top of that.

If I had to give you just one tip to design your schema: favor simple queries
and mutations that do just one thing instead of trying to generalize your use-
cases. For example if you want your client to be able to retrieve your
Products by id and by name, instead of going for `product(id: String, name:
String)` go for `productById(id: String!)` and `productByName(name: String!)`
You'll end up with more fields on Query but the Product type stays the same,
the arguments are clearer (just one that is required) and you'll get simpler
resolvers. To generalize: forget about REST best practices, think about you
queries and mutations as functions and write them with the according best
practices you would apply to functions.

Funny thing I noticed about gql is front-end developers are generally more
comfortable than back-end ones geting the grasp of it as its DNA is really
client-focused.

Sorry for the long reply :)

~~~
brainlessdev
Indeed, at my company I've been working with GraphQL for a while now (about a
year and then something) as a frontend developer, and our main way of
communication with the backend was writing out a GraphQL file as a draft of
how we imagine the API should turn out.

It's nice!

------
rolae
Refactoring Ruby

I am a UX person, but often dabbled in Ruby on Rails. Currently for the the
first time working on a more serious app and now reading the book refactoring
ruby, is very illuminating, going through my code again and rereading makes me
see many mistakes and possible improvements.

------
hmert
Go + graphsql: we have build [https://iban.im](https://iban.im) and open-
sourced
[https://github.com/monocash/iban.im](https://github.com/monocash/iban.im)

------
maxioatic
Golang!

More specifically, trying to build a static site that has all the indexes of
my programming books indexed and searchable using Bleve.

Edit: If anyone has tips on how to extract text from indexes of books that'd
be great. Currently thinking of using OpenCV as I'm comfortable with it.

------
joecasson
More about Adobe Premier Pro. I've been doing video editing for a couple of
years as a hobby, and I am continually amazed at the depths you can go in
video production.

I'm also learning that you can only do so much in post. Sometimes, you just
need a different shot.

------
tjohns
I just got my private pilot's license in December, so I'm studying for my
instrument rating right now.

(New pilots are restricted to flying in "visual" conditions - clear weather.
The instrument rating allows flying in reduced visibility conditions.)

------
rdc12
Making my way through the Robotics Specialization (Penn Uni series) on
Coursera, almost finished the first course on Aerial Robotics.

By the end of the year I hope to have built a autonomous drone, with a custom
flight controller (both motor control and sensing).

------
master_yoda_1
I have to work harder now? I am not sure how people get time to learn in this
quarantine?

------
zebrafish
Learning 3D modeling in blender through videos from Grant Abbitt on YouTube.
No idea what I'm going to do with that skill, it's just something I've always
wanted to learn since Halo: Custom Edition came out on PC.

------
wozmirek
Gluing + painting models and miniatures! I've been bad at manual artistic
things always, so I kinda combined my passion for the history of warfare with
that thing I'm lacking and... here I am, gluing German tank models :)

------
darrmit
I’m a product manager working on a large distributed platform and spent the
weekend trying to deploy the various microservices that make up the platform
to a dev machine using Docker. I wasn’t totally successful but had a blast
doing it!

------
DrKabab
Learning a lot about CTFs and pentesting, most through tryhackme.com Highly
recommend it

------
Gabriel_Martin
Making art with After Effects. If I really get motivated I'll move my
experience into doing Interaction design with Lottie and bodymovin, but for
now it's just a nice way to blow off steam during this difficult time.

------
Disruptive_Dave
Bathymetry & swells, specifically for surfing. I've been a recreational surfer
and getting back into it now, never took the time to learn how waves are
formed and all the things that impact how then end up on our shores

------
jypepin
I just built my first mechanical keyboard which I wanted to do for years but
never jumped shipped - The soldering scared me. It was easier and more fun
than expected!

I also just bought a house and am looking into putting drywall in the garage.

~~~
amatecha
Nice, I've built a few keyboards now -- first I practiced making a couple
"gherkin" keyboards [0] for fun and then an alps64 [1] using some Alps SKCM
Cream Damped switches I harvested from a dead Apple Extended Keyboard II.
Probably my favorite build!! It gets a lot of comments from coworkers :)

[0]
[http://www.40percent.club/2016/11/gherkin.html](http://www.40percent.club/2016/11/gherkin.html)

[1]
[https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=69740.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=69740.0)

------
janderson3
Toki Pona.

It it's a constructed language that has recently hit the front page of HN a
couple of times. It's been fun. Helps reorganize your thoughts a little bit
and it's good practice for learning a more complicated language.

------
imdhmd
To build a keyboard. /r/mechaniclekeyboards has been a great resource

------
coupdejarnac
I've just found someone to teach me how to play the trumpet. I figure I ought
to learn how to play an instrument before I get too much older. I've also been
brushing up my Chinese and learning Typescript.

------
jackhalford
Been getting back into physics for the past few months. I've started reading
the Landau&Lifschitz books and have been making flashcards out of the problem
sets.

I'm also following MITs online math courses to get back up to speed.

------
status_down
I'm learning about solar PV energy systems. This is an awesome subject to
learn.However,I'm having a hard time trying to find basic but comprehensive
courses online. Any suggestions?

------
humility
Operating Systems, specifically BSD sockets/multi threading.

I'm a JavaScript/Node.Js fanatic, figure it's time for me to up my game and go
first principles.

Operating System Concepts by Silbeschatz, Galvin and Gagne to the rescue.

------
abhchand
Just learning more in depth about websockets. It's been around for a while but
i've honestly never had the chance to play around with them.

Thinking of putting together a small app as an excuse to play around with
websockets

------
elil17
How to be happier! I'm taking "The Science of Wellbeing" on Coursera

~~~
fmonteiro
Same. Do you know where I can find notes on the course? I took some notes but
I would like to have a summary of everything so I can remember it every once
in a while.

Amazing course btw.

------
DrNuke
I was a poet and translator as a young adult and went back to the art to blow
off steam
[https://poeticnopoetry.wordpress.com/](https://poeticnopoetry.wordpress.com/)

------
ascendantlogic
I've been devops/infra for the last few years and my web dev skills have
fallen into disrepair. So I'm doing a side project with Django REST API,
Golang Job Runners and React SPA to bring myself back up to par.

~~~
mettamage
How would you describe the difference between working in devops vs working in
web dev?

~~~
ascendantlogic
My days right now are full of Chef, Terraform, Bash, etc. The coding I am
doing is usually scripts and utilities. It's more about glue and automation vs
actual product/feature dev.

~~~
BenjiWiebe
That's the job I want.

------
focodev
I'm entering my junior year in a CS program and just had my internship
opportunities rescinded because of the virus. So I'm home taking a docker /
K8s course on Udemy as well as a Spring Boot course.

~~~
cdiddy2
Aw man, sorry to hear that. Sounds like your making the best of it though!

------
zaphod420
I'm learning hoon.
[https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/setup/](https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/setup/)

------
vagabond_appen
I've bee learning- \- Korean. I've meaning to learn it for a long time, but
due to exams, never been able to do so. \- I want to get into Bug Bounties, I
have going through hacker101 and TryHackMe rooms.

------
ZeroClickOk
Blazor ([https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-
apps/blazor](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor))

------
ddrt
Maybe not what I’m learning but I learned a little bit about learning from
this ted talk [https://youtu.be/5MgBikgcWnY](https://youtu.be/5MgBikgcWnY)

------
meagher
Vim - documenting my progress on Futureland
[https://futureland.tv/tmm/vim](https://futureland.tv/tmm/vim)

------
hrnnnnnn
How to build synthesisers using The Grid in bitwig studio.

It's a modular construction kit for synths that takes advantage of the fact
that it's software, rather than trying to ape physical synth modules.

------
tsuru
Projective Geometric Algebra

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo&feature=youtu.be)

------
rayhendricks
Right now webdev in general, specifically Angela Yu’s course udemy. Decided
that for the flushable future my industry (biotech) is not howling so time to
do something more profitable for awhile.

------
xthetrfd
I am trying to improve my web development skills by writing a chat
application. I will implement saving messages to the database next.

Also I want to learn something ml-ish probably play with opencv or pytorch.

------
cognitoMagneto
I am trying to learn more about distributed systems.

Any one have a recommendation for a MOOC or a book that could help?

I am specifically looking to understand frameworks such as Dask or Ray and how
to build a similar system from scratch.

Thanks!

~~~
maxioatic
I haven't done much in Dask and never heard of Ray, so might not be applicable
directly.

But a general book about distributed systems that I highly recommend and one
you'll see often referred to on HN is Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
Seriously great book and one I often go back to for fundamentals about
distributed systems.

~~~
cognitoMagneto
I appreciate it, will look up that book

------
machiaweliczny
I am learning Unity basics with Minecraft tutorial[1]. It's quite nice.

[1] - [https://youtu.be/h66IN1Pndd0](https://youtu.be/h66IN1Pndd0)

------
hypersundays
Currently building something with Svelte.

It's not as breezy as I was hoping...

------
emmanueloga_
I started before covid, but I'm learning Clojure, XSLT/XQuery/XPath 3.0,
SPARQL, RDF* and SHACL. I look forward building a personal knowledge base
combining all these.

------
timrichard
I'm learning Go from scratch. I dabbled four years ago, but not much has stuck
from then. Also, Final Cut Pro which I've been meaning to do for some time.
It's great fun.

------
rxsel
Not very exciting, but I’ve been learning and using vue for a new side
project.

The side project itself is essentially a platform to enable post-split parents
co-parent effectively.

------
j-rom
Django. I'm building a side project to help learn it. I've been wanting to
spend more time on side projects and now seems like a good opportunity to dive
into them.

~~~
damoday
What are you making? I like django, seems easier initially than something like
PHP-Laravel

~~~
j-rom
I'm building a web app that gives suggestions on what activities people can do
during quarantine / at home. Getting Django set up and working was pretty
straight forward. I think the only difficult part was dealing with the
dependencies and the python versions.

------
AlchemistCamp
I've been getting interested in Tailwind CSS recently. I'm also spending some
time learning more about tools I already use a lot—Elixir, Postgres, VIM, Git,
etc.

------
jdkee
Finally getting around to some discrete mathematics texts and the foundations
of mathematics. All driven by an intense desire to understand the Busy Beaver
function.

------
_spoonman
Golang! [https://quii.gitbook.io/learn-go-with-
tests/](https://quii.gitbook.io/learn-go-with-tests/)

~~~
wegymoo
me too! If you haven't already I highly recommend gophercises
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVEltXlEeWglGINo25GxV...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVEltXlEeWglGINo25GxVfvSSylLVg4r1)
lots of useable examples

------
sudhirkhanger
I am learning Data Structure and Algorithm and I have also started a book club
with a friend where we would be reading at least one chapter of a book every
week.

------
indytechcook
Finally getting to doing Ben Eaters 8-bit computer build:
[https://eater.net/8bit](https://eater.net/8bit).

------
cferr
I'm learning how effective I can be without physical access to my equipment.
Due to the nature of our environment, I'm estimating about 40%.

------
ineedasername
Improving my python skills by implementing programs that utilize an API for an
LMS product to better provide analysis of increased use of online learning
tools

------
ronyfadel
\- Brushing up on my spanish since I moved to Latin America. \- I’m learning
UX design and Sketch to become better at making my own designs for my
software.

------
husarcik
I'm a medical student so I'm currently in a COVID-19 course. Outside that I've
decided to work on understanding C/C++ better.

------
eaguyhn
I wanted to do some simple tabulations on COVID19 data so I did some work with
Excel and public datasets. Never used Power Query before, so learned that.

------
mtreis86
I am trying to wrap my head around NP Completeness, so I have been watching
some open course lectures, reading Garey and Johnson, and going on many walks.

------
zitterbewegung
Started learning more about AR. Trying to make an app for people to practice
social distancing using AR. Basically to visualize how far 1-2m away is .

------
dullroar
dotnet interactive (aka Jupyter notebook with a C# kernel). Been using it
along with XPlot.Plotly to chart various CV datasets from JHU, the NYT, etc,

------
iomcr
Crystal Lang - I couldn't find a JS framework I liked that also had good
Typescript support, so I took a longshot in building a no-js webapp.

------
PopeDotNinja
I'm writing an HTTP client + server in Elixir. I wanted to see if I could make
all of the tests run in parallel using TLS. Working well so far!

------
erynvorn
Python, to catch up with some of my projects. I'd like to do some web
searching and work on Kaggle. com where I understand Python is necessary.

------
dharma1
Outside day to day work, right now I am practicing

-HDR colour grading in Davinci Resolve

-playing cuban congas (that slap is hard)

-designing Flutter apps

-feeling gratitude every day

-how to motivate kids

-growing tomatoes from shop bought tomatoes

------
jp42
I am working on improving my Signal to Noise ratio. Meaning consistently how
to do more and more constructive work than wasting time each day.

~~~
aashu_dwivedi
How are you going about it?

------
heyharmon
Learning Laravel and using it to build a platform to help manage some of the
labor intensive activities at my web design and development agency.

------
jeanlucas
I'm learning Flutter and Golang, hope to use it soon in a real life scenario;
but I don't have any projects to use it in yet.

------
kalyantm
I've started to do yoga. Two weeks in and it's going well actually. Also as a
FE Developer, the inner workings of JavaScript

------
mud_dauber
DevOps tools. VirtualBox, Vagrant, Ansible & Jenkins.

Good list?

------
qtcake
I've been scoping out new (to me) infrastructure tech. Nomad, Spinnaker,
Packer to name a few. It's been very enlightening.

------
feiss
A girl and a baby girl. I'm learning about my patience and how to cope with my
anger on limit situations. ️

------
sh87
I'm learning to say no.

------
rmdashrfstar
Russian, Rust, and Domain-Driven Design. Lots to go! Lots of depth to these
three rabbit holes, and only two have some overlap.

------
coherentpony
I'm very much a software person, so I decided to learn more about hardware and
the design of circuits. Pretty cool stuff.

------
hackandtrip
Looking at some llvm code, in particular the clang's OpenMP implementation

Getting familiar with OpenMP - MPI (are those used in real life?)

------
Folcon
I'm finally getting around to building a game, I've always been fascinated
with paradox style grand strategy games and logistics and management games
like openttd.

Speaking with some friends, they encouraged me to give it a go, but start with
the goal. Which eventually translated to writing a stock market sim first.

The concept itself is a multiplayer grand strategy style game set in a fantasy
style universe. I've got it working on a calendar system like a paradox game,
I'm aiming for it to be running continuously with a leaderboard and periodic
resets. I very much want player actions to run within the sim context, IE: The
player isn't special in any significant way, they control an entity, whether
that's a peep or some other in-game entity.

I have a basic demand system for my simulated people working, who buy goods
they need from shops local to them and purchasing activity is reported on the
market, traders trade against market activity and at present all a player can
do is be a trader, running on a Clojure server which uses websockets to update
the client.

There's a lot of things I want to do, I've got a map generation prototype that
I built after reading some of Amit's amazing articles [1], I've been scouring
my old rpg source books GM sections to try and work out what a decent set of
pieces plugged together would look like, after all I figure they're supposed
to create the illusion of a vibrant world for players, so why not flip through
them for ideas? However I'm limiting this a bit because I don't want to get
bogged down not building stuff!

I'm presently doing some initial sanity checking, basically trying to work out
what are the current performance characteristics of my sim, IE: Does every
entity need to be updated on every tick, does that look "nice" from a player's
perspective, or create odd artefacts? Also some simple refactoring to just
clean stuff up.

The other two problems to solve is keeping everything nicely organised as I
really want this to get big in it's interconnected complexity (though perhaps
that's a terrible idea), putting together a simple way to monitor the system's
running as the game designer.

Keeping scope small and focused is hard, enthusiasm gets you to want to add
all sorts of wacky stuff.

All of the above is subject to change if I figure out a better way of doing it
=)...

\- [1] [http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-
programming/...](http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-
programming/polygon-map-generation/)

------
pm2222
Clojure, clj tools, figwheel-main, leiningen, sqlite, https, certificates,
csrf, reagent, uberjar, smtp. For one app.

------
ChicagoBoy11
Unity has made all of their premium ed content free for a few months, so
trying to absorb as much of it as I can!

------
leovander
Reading Land of Lisp[0].

[0] [http://landoflisp.com/](http://landoflisp.com/)

~~~
sloaken
Loved the website, ordered the book. Any boo that could make a song has got to
be good .... right?!? Well at least deserves to have me try.

------
Quiark
Category theory

Quantum Entanglement (lectures by Leonard Susskind at Stanford)

creative building in Minecraft :)

(I already knew how to make sourdough from before)

------
nsomaru
Wordpress. The speed at which clients are requesting new stuff is faster than
one-man-Django can keep up

------
mapandey
Datomic [https://www.datomic.com](https://www.datomic.com)

------
manish_gill
Graph Algorithms and Distributed Systems

------
ctrager
Violin duets. Worst case, I can learn both parts, record one part, and then
play the duet with myself.

------
odyssey7
I'm getting into PureScript and Haskell, with the intention of using them in
real-world projects.

------
lukego
Soldering and reworking electronics.

------
TaylorGood
How to run a DTC business. Everything that has tried to stop this has, but I
keep pushing forward.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
ASP.NET

After a career of mostly embedded systems development, I'm building my first
commercial webapp.

------
rodolphoarruda
Infosec history. I'm just entered the PC era, so things tend to be more
interesting from now on.

~~~
CalRobert
Is this purely technical or including the stories, people and politics around
it as well?

------
mmphosis
X (x.org) xlib xcb running on Void Linux (development.) Also reading The
Animators Survival Kit.

------
jackfoxy
Mineralogy and working my way through Structure and Interpretation of
Classical Mechanics

------
lugermorph
how to make fonts :)

~~~
rassibassi
Friend of mine created a parameterised font for his master thesis. We hooked
it up to a face expression sentiment analyser (pre trained DNN). It works in
the browser with your webcam, better to use a laptop or pc :)

[http://facetype3000.herokuapp.com/](http://facetype3000.herokuapp.com/)

------
tim333
Rails. And also presentation skills by recording myself to camera, replaying
and repeating.

~~~
lunarraid
I'm about 40 hours into learning Rails myself, and talk about hitting wall.
Learning from home on your own with no mentor is brutal, especially since
there is a very specific thing I am trying to do, so the basic TODO apps just
don't cut it.

~~~
tim333
Rails is actually quite hard in my opinion. I was working through "Getting
Started with Rails" where you make a blog with posts they call articles and
counting the number of ways the word article pops up in code. I'm up to 14
now, Article, article, articles, Articles @articles, articles_path etc, some
of which you type in and some which are magically generated and pluralized,
singalized, lower cased or whatever. I guess experienced rails devs know all
that stuff backwards but there's a lot of not very obvious things to get your
head around.

------
wolfgang000
c# + asp.net core, after working for 3 (painful)years in java I wanted to try
the "Java done right", so far it has been a really pleasant experience, not so
nice as Python + Django or Ruby + RoR, but light years ahead of spring boot.

------
RocketSyntax
I'd like to learn Node and Plotly next so that I can build some UIs in
JupyterLab 2.0

------
vladmk
Sales and marketing through starting my agency, everything else is secondary
in business.

------
praveenpenumaka
I'm learning how xgboost and numpy works internally by implementing them in
golang

------
sonalr
Learning a new language, Received a Rust book for my bday so finally get
around that.

------
horizontech-dev
Spent the weekend mentoring students who are building projects using React and
Python.

------
duxup
Playing with Firebase.

Auth is super handy.

On the other hand I didn't anticipate how wired my brain is for SQL...

------
awinter-py
VR hand tracking SDK

and am reading 50k word TOS (not sure 'learning' is the verb there but *)

------
JacobiX
OCaml, MirageOS and Irmin. Lots of fun, the tooling is better than I was
expecting.

------
KingFelix
Multiple ways to build a device that could simulate consciousness / the brain.

------
billfruit
Attempting to learn Latin. Duolingo has a surprisingly good Latin module now.

------
copacopab
Data Science via [https://www.codecademy.com/learn/paths/data-
science](https://www.codecademy.com/learn/paths/data-science) (really want to
get good at web scraping!) and Figma via Youtube videos.

Anyone have any fav tutorials on Figma?

------
tootie
GCP and Kubernetes so I am better versed in talking a client out of using it.

------
stevetursi
Spanish, and Category Theory

I can't tell yet which is harder. Both are pretty tough.

------
Myzis
Studying webpack to understand how vue and react manage their packages :)

------
avip
Gardening.

------
aeden
I've been learning about Firebase by building something for fun.

------
darkbatman
I am doing deeplearning.ai. The course seems to be really nice.

------
cortesoft
I am learning that I couldn't cut it as a stay at home parent.

------
Myzis
Studying webpack to understand how react manage their packages :)

------
devgoth
im learning clojure and building a web app. honestly this is by far the
coolest language ive used and i love it. im having so much fun.

outside of that im trying to learn polish as well

------
foxh0und
AWS, and finally getting stuck into The Pragmatic Programmer.

------
macrolime
Making hardware/gadgets with arduino and 3d printing.

------
Medicalidiot
I'm studying for the USMLE, so just general medicine.

------
mister_hn
I am learning Ansible from the 30-days free course of RedHat

[https://blcsystems.com/red-hat-free-courses/](https://blcsystems.com/red-hat-
free-courses/)

------
punchclockhero
Expectations: Ansible and Azure DevOps

Reality: armor locations in GTA IV

~~~
rochak
Hits too close to home

------
ferchoriverar
Design User Interface

------
kvimal13
Have started learning French language from duolingo.

------
hudvin
Deutsch some ancient history NLP / Deep Learning

------
antfarm
Electric bass and music theory.

------
state_less
I’m trying to free my mind from the usual grind.

------
konart
Drawing. I always wanted to learn how to draw.

------
Veera_Sivarajan
I'm learning Mandarin and Web Development

------
chaboo
UI Design using Figma for my SaaS landing page

~~~
bluedevil2k
I would recommend just going to a site like themeforest.net and buying a theme
you like. I did that, searched for “bootstrap 4” under their landing page, and
quickly built a site that would look better than anything I could ever do.

------
aspencer8111
How is COBAL not the top answer here?!?!?

------
jimmaswell
vue.js for a potential upcoming job requirement. Seems easy enough, but not
sure I'd want to use it personally.

------
zoeey123
Doing MIT 6.006, intro to algorithms

------
jacobush
Learning how to do darkroom printing.

------
oscbco
C++. I want to make Node.js addons

------
thomasmore
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto no. 2

~~~
tunesmith
I've been tempted to get back into Concerti, previously I learned the Ravel G
major and a movement of Prokofiev #3. I should look into if there's a good way
to make a piano-less orchestral track "listen" to what I'm playing and play
along.

------
welcher
I'm in my junior year of University. My semester is predominantly General
Education requirements. Here's a breakdown of what we're learning about:

\- World Civilization I:

At this point in time, the course is following the Cro-Magnon's during the
Mesolithic age, specifically around the time that the Neanderthals/Denisovans
go extinct and Cro-Magnons evolve into Homo Sapiens Sapiens. This is also
around the time that Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal hybrids cross the Beringia Bridge
into modern day Alaska. During this time, there's shifts in every single
aspect of life on Earth. I've uploaded the most recent lecture notes for those
that are interested.

[https://textuploader.com/14j86](https://textuploader.com/14j86)

\- Astronomy II:

This has been my favorite course this semester (aside from Computer Systems).
My professor does an amazing job presenting the concepts and his passion is
very apparent as he teaches. Unfortunately, that effect has been greatly
reduced, with classes now being online. The other downer about online class is
that I won't be able to use the telescopes for lab. Stemming from our previous
sections, which covered the Sun, star formation, and star evolution, we're now
covering the various models presented throughout time that tried to reason our
position within the Milky Way through stargazing. Here's the lecture if you
care to watch.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?=AUlr2hlAPcM&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?=AUlr2hlAPcM&feature=youtu.be)

\- Technical Writing:

Project 2, that accounts for 30% of my grade, was due Friday. The objective
was to create documentation for a program or application. I was having a hard
time finding a program, application, package, framework, or language I used,
that wasn't already documented to a high enough standard (coincidence? :P). I
didn't want to replicate any documentation that already existed so I decided
to write an Angular library for creating a vertical or horizontal timeline and
documentation for it. I turned it in two hours late, so I most likely will not
get credit. Publishing my own code for others to use brought me more joy than
I would've imagined.

\- Computer Systems I:

The lectures have been covering pipelining, control / data dependencies,
forwarding paths, etc. It's extremely fun. In lab, we're programming the
Y86-64 ISA using C++.

Besides that stuff and my dance class, where we've learned about the dance
throughout the 1900s to present, I've been going through a Udemy course on
Kubernetes in preparation for my summer internship and CKA.

------
happyrock
Clojure!

------
Russelfuture
Learning Z80 assembler, matrix algebra, reloading (9mm, .45, etc.), how to
draft detailed building plans (something that is detailed enough to get a
building permit approved), and market "Technical Analysis" \- the study of
chart patterns to set buy/sell points.

    
    
      This all seems a bit silly, but everything is closed.  Also doing a lot of wood cutting and cleanup in the forest.  We built a custom designed Z80 SBC ( single board computer), with its own Z80MON monitor, and the genius guy I am working with has managed to put the BASIC interpreter into the monitor.  Just got MInipro installed and working on the MACbook, using HomeBrew.  I'm trying to get one of those TL866II pROM programmers - first one ordered got bounced by customs.  We've ordered second one, paid premium to have it couriered.  All the flights are ground-stopped, so it may be a while.   I really like the idea of building a whole computer from parts ordered from Mouser, having all the Monitor and interpreter code, and being able to download the code into A ROM chip, plug it in, and link to the thing with Kermit or Screen session from a Linux box, and have it process matrix data from our AI stuff.  
     

We live in deep farm country, where self-reliance is pretty hard core. Some
farms up the road from ours, are not even on the grid. (They have wind
generators and diesel tractors - some even have CNC machines).

We still have good internet access, and we are on-grid, but this whole virus-
driven economic meltdown has absolutely confirmed our expectations. We are
seriously looking at something that will look like the 1930's now. I worked in
8080 Assembler years ago, and I'd forgotten so much. But I've got two Z80
SBC's working now, one with it's own standalone VT-100 emulator board, and a
little 40$ Chinese made VGA screen, which actually works pretty good. I can
run that config off two lithium-ion batteries. The missing piece is to be able
to use an SD-card. We have a prototype of a much more complex SBC that has a
sound chip, and an SD card driver chip. It runs full CP/M, but I like the more
simple design, since it does ot use surface mount - real old school.

And there is this ton of other stuff that must be done. We need to be able to
reload, and I have all the dies and such for this. We are also doing a bunch
of in-house food preparation, since the electricity is still working, and so
we are making different types of food that can be easily frozen.

And the price action on the investment portfolios is requiring attention,
since we have these predictive algorithms that are offering some insite into
where to place trades. The markets are insane, but there are opportunites that
do crop up. I realize that most traditional "fundamental" analysis is of
little value in this kind of environment, as the automatic algos are running
most of the action. We have no chance at all of accessing any "government
money", so we are really working our existing systems just to try to bring in
some liquidity by quick in and out action. So far this is working, but it is
absolutely crazy.

We have non-trading long-term positions on the left side of a tradional
barbell, and these are just getting slaughtered. It feels like stories I read
about in wartime, those First World War stories. Your whole "picture of the
world" falls apart, and suddenly, all that crazy, hacky stuff you thought you
would never really need or use (like the gas-mask in the garage) - suddenly,
it's the stuff that is keeping you alive, and your economic and technical
process actually working.

So, I am going thru notes, and invoking stuff that we documented back in 1987
( mkt crash), and in 1998 (Russian Default), and of course the 9/11 stuff,
which was short and sharp, and followed by a big pop. But the data this time
suggests no - too much has been badly damaged already. So we are mainly
working on a plan to survive economically, for the next 12 months.

We should be OK, but only because we had these backup Plan B and Plan C's and
such. We went to Costco two days ago, and a hundred people were lined up, out
into the parking lot, as "social distancing" was being enforced. It's making
us pull out the SHTF playbook plans. It could all be summed up as "We are
reviewing our strategies for maximum independece, and actively working to
enhance our capacity for fully independent action." And I am reviewing all my
Linux notes - we have several flavours of Linux boxes, that run the analytic
and data management stuff. Need to ensure we can keep on keeping on. So far,
it's all ticking along ok, but it's all up to us now. We are learning to be
100% self-supporting, I guess would sum it up. So far, it's working. But it's
a new world now. We are all going to need a _lot_ of different skills.

------
Jahak
C++

------
BWGB
how to cut my own hair :$

------
michaelanckaert
Common Lisp and Clojure!

------
xutopia
How to make croissants.

------
heyrhett
Fortnite

Add me on epic: Rhett800cc

------
lhtr
TLA+ and Alloy.

------
0x262d
Marxism In Our Time, an article by Leon Trotsky. A summary of Marx's theory of
capitalism, specifically as it pertained to the great depression in the United
States, when incredibly high profits and a surging stock market were
accompanied by massive inequality and then it all crashed, causing widespread
poverty and social unrest despite society's technical and material ability to
provide for everyone. I think it will be very relevant soon.

[https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/marxism.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/marxism.htm)

------
pknerd
Go and Rust.

------
piercebot
Patience.

------
LouisSayers
I'm not working at the moment (and fortunate enough I can continue that for
quite a while) and decided I'd just like to do some learning. I have a CS
degree from about 12 years back and have worked as a Fullstack dev for the
last 10 years, but after looking at [https://careers.google.com/how-we-
hire/interview/](https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/interview/) realise
that I'm really not playing at the same level as a what a lot of others are.
There are a lot of gaps in my CS knowledge, so I'm working on my knowledge and
skills while learning and improving on coding in Go.

As an ENFP I can't just sit and learn one thing at once, so I tend to cycle
(with no particular pattern) through the following:

Graph Algorithms A combination of learning on edx.org, and also reading
through Tim Roughgardens graph algorithms book. Both are quite technical and
take me quite a long time to digest the info. Sometimes I digress to dig
deeper into things like Big O notation and the mathematical reasoning behind
things like why you can drop constants and lower order terms, but on the whole
really enjoying the materials.
[https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UCSanDiegoX+ALGS20...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UCSanDiegoX+ALGS202x+2T2017/course/)
[https://www.amazon.com.au/Algorithms-Illuminated-Part-
Graph-...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Algorithms-Illuminated-Part-Graph-
Structures-ebook/dp/B07G6X2XMG)

Operating Systems Udacity's Intro to Operating Systems course
([https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud923](https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud923))
Have also downloaded but not yet started reading "Operating Systems Concepts -
10th edition" which you can get from [https://www.os-
book.com/](https://www.os-book.com/) I've only just started going through
these, but essentially I feel like it's an area I'm lacking in terms of my
understanding. When people talk about things like the Linux Kernel - before I
really had no real idea of what that actually meant, and I feel like even with
a few hours doing the course I am starting to have a much better idea of how
things are put together.

Coding interviews I signed up to
[https://www.techseries.dev/](https://www.techseries.dev/) and have started
going through the problems in CoderPro that came along with the expensive
$500-$1000 course. The coderpro course is basically just them going through
leetcode questions... they even show that that's what they're doing in some of
the videos. The main course is OK, but a bit basic. I also have "Grokking the
System Design Interview" course and I find that really good for showing how
others actually think about and step through system design questions. I'd
highly recommend this [https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-
design-...](https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-
interview). I also have Cracking the Coding Interview -
[http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/](http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/)
which I've been using from time to time as well. I highly recommend this book,
I find her step by step approach really insightful, and the book covers a
crazy amount of material (it's a big book - Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell is a
friggin machine).

Go Programming I've been learning Go and using it to code up coding
challenges. For Learning Go I've got a hard copy of "The Go Programming
Language" which is really good and thorough -
[https://www.amazon.com.au/Programming-Language-Addison-
Wesle...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesley-
Professional-Computing-ebook/dp/B0184N7WWS)

I also did a course on Udemy [https://www.udemy.com/course/go-golang-
programming-course](https://www.udemy.com/course/go-golang-programming-course)
which I highly recommend for getting up to speed quickly. I also started going
through Todd Mcleod's Go Clinic on Lynda - that was really good, but I didn't
want to pay a monthly subscription so put that on pause for now. The GoClinic
course is here [https://www.lynda.com/Go-tutorials/Code-Clinic-
Go/439416-2.h...](https://www.lynda.com/Go-tutorials/Code-Clinic-
Go/439416-2.html)

------
accidentalrebel
I'm learning how to make a game engine.

I initially was following along with Handmade Hero a series that I have been
going back to frequently over the past few years.

[https://handmadehero.org](https://handmadehero.org)

The series is great but I wanted something more guided so I am eyeing
purchasing Game Coding Complete. It teaches the internals of a game engine and
uses DirectX for rendering.

[https://www.amazon.com/Game-Coding-Complete-Fourth-
McShaffry...](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Coding-Complete-Fourth-
McShaffry/dp/1133776574)

Because deliveries are on lock down in my country the book will have to wait.

So right now I have gone through SDL tutorials (there was a recent update to
the LazyFoo SDL tutorial) and am currently finishing OpenGL.

[http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php](http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php)
[https://learnopengl.com/](https://learnopengl.com/)

Finally, I've been checking out repositories of open source game engines and
poking around their codes. interesting ones are below:

Godot - Probably a lot of people already know about this one

[https://github.com/godotengine/godot](https://github.com/godotengine/godot)

Pyxel - A fantasy game engine similar to Pico8 written in Python, uses SDL

[https://github.com/kitao/pyxel](https://github.com/kitao/pyxel)

Wicked Engine - Haven't poked around much with this yet but the screenshots
looks gorgeous

[https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine/blob/master/READM...](https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine/blob/master/README.md)

Finally here's the video that got me interested in game engines. I saw this
years ago but saw it again recently while researching. It's a 2.5d game engine
that makes great use of lighting while combining 2d sprites and 3d models.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6ISVaM5Ww](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6ISVaM5Ww)

Here's a second video that shows off a winter weather which boggled my mind
when I first saw it.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtYvNEmmHXE#](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtYvNEmmHXE#)

Sorry for the dump, was excited to share these.

------
linux_devil
Node JS

------
geoelkh
react/redux

------
birdyrooster
golang

------
droithomme
Growing a lot of food and practicing my marksmanship skills.

~~~
jmeister
Your comment shows up last and it’s the only one that is funny

