I can’t really listen to podcasts or watch talks and work at the same time. I also can’t watch talks and walk or run at the same time. What I can do is listen to talks and walk or run at the same time. But there are a lot of great talks I want to learn from!

Solution: youtube-dl plus Overcast Premium’s file uploads feature. Boom.

Almost fifteen years since the first time I encountered an RSS feed (and therewith XML), I actually spent the time tonight to learn what <![CDATA[...]]> is.

Related: I believe I have (finally!) finished fixing my Atom feed output all the way. 😅

I have a problem, and it’s called too many interests. I started reading Boyd’s Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra today, because I’ve long wanted to fill this gap from my college math. But maybe I should finish other in-progress books first?

Learned how to use the INDEX and MATCH functions in spreadsheets this morning. I’m always amazed at how powerful spreadsheets are — and all with relatively simple tools.

Just finished reading Zeynep Tüfeçki’s utterly masterful Twitter and Tear Gas. The book is astonishing. It gave me better frames for thinking about a great many things I’ve been thinking about for a long time now, and it is a masterful work of academic scholarship presented in a way that just about anyone could read.

Notional Machines and Introductory Programming Education is an outstanding survey — focused on a key element in teaching year-1 CS students: “notional machines” (which are not the same as “mental models”!). Teaching is a huge part of my job, and this was quite illuminating.

I love Jessica Kerr’s One key trick to becoming a wizard developer: it’s a great combo of summarizing “how to do this” with a “worked example.” Once you realize you can do this, it becomes a kind of superpower — and when I share it with mentees, it’s often a 💡 🤯 moment for them.

After thinking about it off and on for years, I’m finally giving Anki a try as a tool for learning things. Will report back on how it’s going in a few months!

This comes just a few days, not a few months, in my picking up Anki, but I wanted to report because: so far I really like it! I’ve been using it to pick back up my Greek and Hebrew as well as to learn new things (like set and category theory), and it’s good.

When you start reading an introductory tutorial with a section title like “<some topic> in a Nutshell”… and the third paragraph is about ⅔ incomprehensible to you. 😅 Time to go see if I can get my head at least a little bit around how functor modules work in OCaml. (And yes: put the relevant bits into Anki!)

As I’m slowly working through my notes — recently exported from Bear and into Obsidian — I see three issues:

• not enough links and connective tissue
• too much “collection” (esp. from books) without analysis or synthesis
• too many tags!