I have many interests and hobbies. Too many! I end up bad at all of them.
Usually I am actively reading 2 or 3 books at a time. This is possible because at least one of the books is typically a textbook, another is some sort of less serious non-fiction, and the third is a fiction book. I turn my attention more infrequently to other texts which I consider to be medium and long-term projects.
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Here are the books I am currently reading:
Fiction: Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Non-Fiction: Land by Simon Winchester
Textbook: Database Internals by Alex Petrov
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Here are some books that I've recently finished:
Non-fiction: Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Tatum
Non-Fiction: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
Non-fiction: Running the Books by Avi Steinberg
Fiction: No Man's Land by John Vigna
Non-fiction: Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Non-fiction: The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal
Non-fiction: The Turnaway Study by Diana Greene Foster
Every 6 to 18 months, I will discover a topic that's of intense interest to me and begin to fixate on it. Most recently, this topic has been interactive theorem provers (like Coq), although I am also interested in learning about the theory behind programming languages in general. I have put together the following diagram of texts which I intend to read over the course of my self-study:
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This diagram is admittedly quite ambitious. My confidence in completing it is misguided and stems from the unexpected continuous productivity that I've been experiencing since the start of the pandemic. At the end of the day, I am looking to teach myself the equivalent of the UW courses CS 245E (auditing F2020), CS 365, and some of CS 462, CS 442 (taken W21) , CS 444. Since I have graduated from an entirely different faculty, I will likely not get the opportunity to take these courses myself 😭.
Previous topics of interest to me have been:
- Digital Hardware Design and HDLs
- Systems programming
- Graph Theory
- Material Science, specifically as it relates to transistors
- Biochemistry ! (back in high school)