Instead of learning software engineering I would want to learn:
Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging [1] a.k.a. OSKM
My first experiments would be on some really old horses. I could probably buy a 30 year old horse from a neighbor. She is on her last leg. I want to make her younger again and then just let her have many more years of chilling and not having to make babies every year. If can learn this well enough to reverse the age of a dozen horses then my second test subject would be myself. If I get that right then my friends could optionally do the same.
This is not meant to be snarky, but I can't help but ask:
* Did I miss a tone indicator (/s) in your response?
* If not, why do you think that transcriptional reprogramming of fibroblast cells in culture (as per the Yang et al. paper you cite), which results in "reversing trancriptomic age" can be applied to whole organisms?
* Ignoring the "de-aging" horses bit, is it realistic to think that getting a handle on the science behind cellular reprogramming is really just a 100 hour task?
Because it has been for several years in mice and monkeys.
really just a 100 hour task?
To learn, yes. It is a well established process. Mice have been aged, de-aged, aged, de-aged using this process. One can find videos on Youtube from Dr. Sinclairs team that show the mice and their physical abilities during the entire process. This has also been used on humans specifically in the optic nerves but it won't be long before it is approved for body-wide usage. I would not expect the learning process to exceed 72 hours not counting breaks.
A hundred hours won't be sufficient, but I really need to learn a new language in order to secure a better citizenship. With it, my job finding prospects will significantly improve. Being an immigrant sucks, future security isn't as sure.
It won't boost my career, but if I had 100 hours I would spend my time learning formal methods for software development probably going through this course: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/FMSD/ .
Touch typing... I'm embarrassed to confess I'm still typing with just 4 fingers while keeping my eyes on the keyboard instead of the screen.
Although I doubt it would require 100 hours to learn.
Just a few days ago I started using Keybr to learn to touch type. It frustrates me less than any other program I've used before, so far. I'm touch-typing this comment... slowly ;)
I can type quickly through my own means but very inaccurately. In a recent fast-paced online game the other players assumed I wasn't a native English speaker due to all my typos. I was a Vim user for ten years and would constantly mash the wrong keys. After starting touch-typing a few days ago, I redownloaded the old Vimfx extension to control my web browser from my keyboard. It ended up requiring me to switch to a Firefox fork called Waterfox though, as the modern (post-2017) extensions have to rely on injecting Javascript into the page and don't work well.
It took me a few months on keybr honestly when I got a new, ergonomic keyboard. The problem with ergo keyboards is they're split at the middle and suddenly my left hand couldn't reach for what was on the right side like it normally would and I had never realized I was doing it "wrong" all this time.
If you're going to learn it, use at least a split columnar keyboard and a non qwerty layout. Learning to touch type on a regular keyboard will likely worsen your health compared to your four finger hunt and peck due to the bad uncomfortable qwerty touch typing enforces. Think about the awful pinky curls and reaches. Ouch!
I'm almost 40 and have no issues with this yet. Colemak is my favorite non-QWERTY and feels smooth, but sadly, programming was designed with QWERTY in mind. The 30% comfort improvement wasn't really worth it and there's a speed drop because I've been on QWERTY since 5 years old. I also use my laptop in well, laptop mode half the time, so eventually I went back to QWERTY.
But it's actually surprising on mobile how much easier a non-QWERTY keyboard is considering it's two thumbs and your thumbs are at the pinky areas most of the time.
spread dev pinky awareness whenever possible, we need a ribbon..the struggle is real and its a sign of excessive copy pasting. customized split keyboard is the cure so bring on the subsidized moonlanders for all
I think subsidized svalboards are far better. Moonlanders are an evolution to the standard keyboard design, but a svalboard is a step function improvement - a true keyboard revolution.
My experience is you can learn this between dev tasks. Find a way to automate deployment (I did ansible)and monitor(eabbix or grafana). Plan, say, half an hout weekly time to review monitoring and logs. Also handle crashes and severe errors in a systemic way, automating them away. Do this for a few months and you've learned devops.
I only did Execute Program for a little bit and don't remember much, but the developer's Destroy All Software screencasts are what taught me how to write parsers. I must have rewatched that video 30 times while I was writing my first one.
1. Drawing, like proper academic drawing. I think I'm close to the skill cap on mobile dev. Design skill would help a lot, things like seeing lighting and stuff. There's things like ambient light, like if the bottom of an area is purple, the top is green, the bottom will bounce some purplish light onto the middle which affects how shadows will look. This is something AI still has problem grasping. Also things like composition, like which people are on the left, which are on the right.
2. CSS tricks and animation. While other people try to race on Leetcode, my personal favorite is CodePen.
3. Probably learn Flutter and React properly instead of just going in blind and editing code.
Is it a whole 100 hours block without fragmentation, or any 100 hours that you can allocate?
I assume the first case, i.e. you have about 4 days to learn something. I'd recommend taking up some paid, intensive training as most such trainings take about 3-5 days and you can maximize the learning during the 4 days of timeframe.
Oh I see. I guess it depends on how big one chunk is then. I'd still vote for paid training if you get big chunks. If only smaller chunks are available, hmmm, it's difficult to say. Maybe prepare for a certificate?
I'd probably do either the aws or azure architecture exams. I use both fairly often but have a bit of a gap on the infrastructure side. Alternatively I might do some actual building in serverless technologies rather than just drawing pictures, I'm at a large company so often developers are picking up the detailed tasks.
If I wanted to do something completely new I might dive into more detail around security/pen testing although I've noticed that a lot of companies doing this just seem to run a lot of off the shelf tools these days.
Learn how to systematically map available online resources (APIs, tools, data) to validated user needs found online. Basically, getting better at connecting existing digital 'building blocks' to solve actual problems.
Not because of the women, but learning a (different) partner dance boosted my self-confidence to a remarkable extent (so far as one can identify causes with these things).
As a means of stopping myself from walking out on a one year contract to work for a terrible IT telecoms company I learned to fly. But that's probably not exactly what you meant.
AI, LLM basics. A hundred hours won't even scratch the surface of recent advanced, but I’d like to understand how LLMs work and the main approaches (diffusion, RLHF), their pros and cons.
Theory of relativity. I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around it. Given some free time, I would really want to understand how two simple postulates can lead to such far-reaching conclusions.
Those two things are related. Linear algebra is a fantastic field in mathematics!
Mathematical reasoning is a superpower. Most of what is worth learning is some specific case of more general reasoning and at the root of general reasoning lies mathematics.
There's no substitute for domain expertise, of course. But being good at generalized reasoning really helps absorb and question domain knowledge (not only in the sense of challenging but also querying), which helps interact productively with specialized domain experts.
Fluid dynamics simulation with OpenCL, 100 hours is about 10-15 days of concerted effort. That's plenty time to get a grasp of the algebra behind it, get something simple running, port to OpenCL naively and start optimizing.
>Could be good for many self taught natural programmers too.
100%. Tons of self taught folks have glaring gaps in their education when it comes to stuff like patterns and algorithms and make weird mistakes because of it.
I was going through a programming course from MIT, and they used some calculus stuff I didn't understand, either never learned or forgot in the last 35 years. So I looked up their calculus class and started on that. Nope, still too advanced, even though I got A's on it in high school. So now I'm doing a pre-calc class and things are coming back to me. Figure in 100 hours I ought to be back up to speed on calculus enough to finish the programming course.
I don't think I had a solid idea of a timeline, but I figured with a couple hours a day I could get through Fundamentals I-III in a month or two. How naive I was!
Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging [1] a.k.a. OSKM
My first experiments would be on some really old horses. I could probably buy a 30 year old horse from a neighbor. She is on her last leg. I want to make her younger again and then just let her have many more years of chilling and not having to make babies every year. If can learn this well enough to reverse the age of a dozen horses then my second test subject would be myself. If I get that right then my friends could optionally do the same.
[1] - https://www.aging-us.com/article/204896/text
* Did I miss a tone indicator (/s) in your response?
* If not, why do you think that transcriptional reprogramming of fibroblast cells in culture (as per the Yang et al. paper you cite), which results in "reversing trancriptomic age" can be applied to whole organisms?
* Ignoring the "de-aging" horses bit, is it realistic to think that getting a handle on the science behind cellular reprogramming is really just a 100 hour task?
Because it has been for several years in mice and monkeys.
really just a 100 hour task?
To learn, yes. It is a well established process. Mice have been aged, de-aged, aged, de-aged using this process. One can find videos on Youtube from Dr. Sinclairs team that show the mice and their physical abilities during the entire process. This has also been used on humans specifically in the optic nerves but it won't be long before it is approved for body-wide usage. I would not expect the learning process to exceed 72 hours not counting breaks.
Did you know there were verification competitions? [0]
[0] https://alastairreid.github.io/verification-competitions/
Do it. You can learn in like 15 minutes a day over a few weeks.
I can type quickly through my own means but very inaccurately. In a recent fast-paced online game the other players assumed I wasn't a native English speaker due to all my typos. I was a Vim user for ten years and would constantly mash the wrong keys. After starting touch-typing a few days ago, I redownloaded the old Vimfx extension to control my web browser from my keyboard. It ended up requiring me to switch to a Firefox fork called Waterfox though, as the modern (post-2017) extensions have to rely on injecting Javascript into the page and don't work well.
https://www.keybr.com/
It took me a few months on keybr honestly when I got a new, ergonomic keyboard. The problem with ergo keyboards is they're split at the middle and suddenly my left hand couldn't reach for what was on the right side like it normally would and I had never realized I was doing it "wrong" all this time.
But it's actually surprising on mobile how much easier a non-QWERTY keyboard is considering it's two thumbs and your thumbs are at the pinky areas most of the time.
But I still can't easily figure out to deploy my apps to a VPS.
So far I have manually set up my server and database.
I want learn more on devops to deploy it using containers.
This will enable me to host mutiple service in a VPS and I don't have to use PAAS solutions.
I can also easily switch providers too.
In general, though, since I believe I’ll lose my job to AI, I’d like to learn and become an electrician.
Frontend Masters might be worth checking out.
2. CSS tricks and animation. While other people try to race on Leetcode, my personal favorite is CodePen.
3. Probably learn Flutter and React properly instead of just going in blind and editing code.
I assume the first case, i.e. you have about 4 days to learn something. I'd recommend taking up some paid, intensive training as most such trainings take about 3-5 days and you can maximize the learning during the 4 days of timeframe.
The Argentinians have a unique approach to the Milonguero style which I’m interested in so in this case they need to be from Argentina ;)
Another option would be one of my other interests, again, spent one on one with a world-class instructor and intentional practice.
If I wanted to do something completely new I might dive into more detail around security/pen testing although I've noticed that a lot of companies doing this just seem to run a lot of off the shelf tools these days.
In that case, I'd probably choose first-aid & the basics of emergency medicine via a couple of half-day or a full-day course per year.
It's actually not a silly idea.
Otherwise, Blender. Been using it at work for a left field innovation project and I'm kind of hooked.
Theory of relativity. I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around it. Given some free time, I would really want to understand how two simple postulates can lead to such far-reaching conclusions.
Mathematical reasoning is a superpower. Most of what is worth learning is some specific case of more general reasoning and at the root of general reasoning lies mathematics.
There's no substitute for domain expertise, of course. But being good at generalized reasoning really helps absorb and question domain knowledge (not only in the sense of challenging but also querying), which helps interact productively with specialized domain experts.
100%. Tons of self taught folks have glaring gaps in their education when it comes to stuff like patterns and algorithms and make weird mistakes because of it.
125 days in. Almost through Fundamentals II.
Careers are made of people not knowledge. Good luck.