Al Gore-isms
It’s a book, stupid.
I saw on Twitter that someone was reading the book “Algorithms” by Panos Louridas and someone else commented that it was a good read. So, being the good nerd that I am, I raced out and got myself a copy.
I haven’t read too much yet, maybe two or three chapters. Enough to cover the majority of Dijkstra’s Algorithm. And it made me realize something:
I just effing love living in the “valley of despair” in a Dunning-Kruger knowledge/perceived-knowledge figure. For some reason I am fascinated by how much smarter other people are than myself.
1337c0d3 v. me
I don’t know where my future career is going to go. I’ve been learning a ton in order to do web development effectively. Here’s a few of the things I’ve needed to learn to get here:
- python and then Flask and Django, the web frameworks.
- javascript, and then React and Sveltekit, the web frameworks.
- HTML and CSS so I can make websites that don’t look like a dog’s breakfast.
- SQL and relational databases, so I can store data effectively.
- Nodejs and Express to be able to program a webserver.
- How to use version control software and collaborate with others.
- How to set up an nginx reverse proxy and load balancer.
And I still have that sinking feeling of
wtf am I doing here? I like the internet, but 99.8% of it is porno or advertising or marketing or social mediae and I don’t want any part of those things.
So.
Enter algorithms
Things are generally pretty good. I spent a year doing web dev work for my current employer. My little open-source project had some traction and was good to introduce people to making Github pull requests.
But I feel like I want to get deeper. To go behing the scenes. I don’t even know doing what. To crunch data, to make things run more efficiently. And algorithms seem to be a crucial step in that process.
So we’ll see where this goes.
But as mentioned earlier, it seems like I’m standing at the bottom of a huge mountain, looking up and being baffled that I might even take a few footsteps up.
But moving forward is what we must do. Otherwise I get bored and overwhelmed by the shitty state of society/planet, so a distraction is a requirement. Right now, I’ve learned a small amount of graph theory and how to find the shortest path between two points using a non-greedy algorithm.
Stay tuned. Hopefully things get nerdy.