Every year that I’ve had a blog I’ve started of the same, I’ve written some rambling post about me sorting my life out in general, this year is no different except I’ve come to realise that unless I have some sort clear goals set, I’ll just remain shit in general…
This blog is no longer to do with my personal life, so I shant bore you with details of whatever plans I have to sort out my physical and mental health. I will however talk briefly about some vague plans I have for projects I have to try and improve my programming/general computer science skills.
Build up some sort of data structure and algorithm dictionary.
This is something I tried to do before but lost motivation before I ever managed to do anything with it. I’ve been reading Hacker News on a daily basis since last August or so and the more I read about tech interviews the more I realise I’ll never get a job with my current level of programming skill and computer science knowledge. Before this I always sort of dismissed a good chunk of the theory side of my education and for some unknown reason I lumped data structures in with that (Idiocy, I know). Basically I’m viewing them as a sort of medium for me to learn languages and increase my exposure to different things. I’ll set up a github repository and slowly build up a collection different data structures (I don’t just mean the general ones that you get taught in university, I mean I’ll be actively looking for cool ones to implement on top of the more vanilla but equally valid ones) and algorithms (Anything really, like The Sieve of Eratosthenes or whatever).
I was taught Ruby last semester which resulted in me forgetting an awful lot of Java, and as much as I dislike Java, improving on my Java would likely be a good idea…. I’ll also be learning C this semester so I’ll try and go through everything using a non-memory managed language for the first time! That’s three languages I’ll be implementing everything in and then the plan is learn a functional programming language, most likely a LISP varient, either Clojure or Scheme, for the lols and bants, you know?
Ultimately I’d like to have a blog posts comparing performance of different data structures when implemented in different languages. I know this isn’t a particularly novel idea, but it’s more for my benefit than anything else, it should be an interesting exercise anyway.
Things I’ll hopefully learn from this: Moar programming skillz, how to use github properly, gnuplot.
Pick a text editor and stick with it.
Over the last semester I noodled around with about 4 different editors and 3 IDEs, I really need to simplify my life and just stick to one, and I may as well make the jump and choose one of the more difficult ones, either vim or EMACS. Purely from an enjoyment perspective, I’ll probably go with vim, navigating text is almost like some dodgy video game.
Focus on things a bit better.
At the moment I’m half interested in every field ever in the CS/Programming world, but this is without any real exposure to anything other than the most shallow excerpts of things. I’m going to try and focus on things a bit better, or a least divide my time up a bit better. I have a bit of website work to do for the paper I write and edit for in college, and a website to build for a society I’m involved with in college, so for the next two months or so I’m going to try and focus on that end of things. Hopefully I’ll managed to build a personal site too.
Things I’ll hopefully learn from this in particular: HTML/CSS, scripting, very basic design,wordpress, social networking APIs, etc.
After the website fun times I’ll either move on to the sort of hacking end of things (Shellcode, exploits, that sort of stuff) or maybe bioinformatics (ie read up on genetics, algorithms and whatnot).
Make a game
I want to design and build a game of some description, I have no idea what, but it’s something I want to do and thus shall do it, invariably I’ll blog about it.
That’s about it really…..
