Hacker School, Wednesday, July 16th, 2014

On Wednesday, I felt the need to go back into explore mode. It is really interesting to me to watch the ebb and flow of my creativity and motivation.

The thing that was motivating me most was concatenative, stack-based programming. So I loaded up some previous documents that had been helpful to me, and went into surf mode.

During this tour, I read about many ideas, from reviewing stack shufflers, to currying in Factor (that article reflects features in Factor that have changed, but was still interesting), how to write recursive functions in Factor (which I still haven't quite figured out), to tail recursion optimisation, to continuation passing style, to continuations, to coroutines, and to Python generators. There were other branches along the way, too.

Some of these ideas were already familiar to me, and some, like coroutines, totally new. Even so, revisiting familiar ideas with this particular context chain, after more time and learning has passed, made my understanding and fascination deeper. I could not help but think of the analogy of continuations and coroutines as they applied to my learning experience.

This kind of exploration was very helpful in rekindling my motivation, which had suffered a lull, and I think it is important to make sure I get some relaxed explore time regularly. The fact that I have been socialising outside of Hacker School more over the last week, has made me feel more rushed during official hours, and I need to guard that. My previous habit of coming in early and staying late allowed me to explore on my own time, and "work" more during the day, but I think that if I have only work hours to put in, I still need to nurture that sense of freedom to explore.

I also improved the front page of subsymbol.org. I didn't like the sales aspect of it, and wanted it to reflect what I like more than what I think I can do for someone else.