Version Control

I won’t beat around the bush. College feels like a giant waste of time and money; not that I am surprised. But to be completely fair I haven’t been productive myself either. I just wasted an entire year. And two years before that. Also two years before that. I have been slacking for way too long and it’s time to get serious.

This is the goal: Speedrun the fundamentals of computer science.

First things first, I need a plan. Fortunately I have one. Unfortunately I don’t have enough braincells to pull it off quickly enough. BUT fortunately my braincell count is exactly at the point where I think I can do it — right the top of the Dunning-Kruger curve.

The Plan™

Okay, so The Plan™ is ridiculously simple: Just study. Okay to be slightly more specific, it includes completing the first three chapters of SICP, and getting comfortable with discrete math and linear algebra. I also want to focus a bit on DSA. All this hopefully by the end the of this first quarter of this year. And if I have a healthy amount of time left, do some math for CS.

If all those links seemed familiar, it is because it’s from teachyourselfcs.com. By the next quarter I am hoping to finish operating systems and networking and a little bit about databases. I probably don’t need to learn about compilers too, so it’s pretty far down the list of things I need to get done immediately — but it’s a nice topic I definitely I want to learn more about after graduation.

And now, the most important part of The Plan™ — I know my ADHD brain will try its best to get distracted by the most random of things, so the aim here is to post a log every week about the things I learned to keep me in check. Similar to how tracking expenses make people more deliberate about their spending, hopefully writing these logs will knock some sense into me and make me aware of how much time I waste every week. These will be short summaries; the actual notes will on a separate repository.

That’s all. See you until next week — if this project still exists by then. If it does, I don’t intend on wasting more than ten minutes writing these. So if anyone is reading this, do not expect any high quality posts at all.

TL;DR: It’s time to start being productive. And hopefully to find gold. Or a job.