Ammar Mian is a software engineer and the co-founder of startup health tech company Malla - and another former student of Oz's and Bradfield School of Computer Science! Many software engineers daydream about starting their own company one day, so we've got Ammar on the show this week to give us the goods. Is it still fun? Can you still get into flow? Are you still coding? Does Oz want to die on Mars? All this and more!

Shownotes:

• Malla
• The Wiggles
• The Six Levels of Interaction with a System
• Zone of proximal development
• Red-bellied black snake
• Reentry [book] - more recent history of SpaceX
• Red Mars [book] - Kim Stanley Robinson

Madison Kanna is a lifelong learner and self-taught programmer who learns in public, and Madison joins Oz and Charlie to share tactics for getting things done (with their learning goals) - and the importance of having fun along the way when learning computer science.

Shownotes

• Madison Kanna's site
• The Cost of Forsaking C
• Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Ryan Holiday - Don't Talk about Writing a Novel

Jason Benn is an ML engineer and truly the epitome of a lifelong learner (Cal Newport even wrote about Jason in one of his books on learning!). Oz and Charlie catch up with Jason on his current self-directed ML sabbatical - which he's corralled into a co-working cohort called mleclub.com (similar to Recurse Center but with an ML / AI focus). We discuss the tactical, strategic, and emotional side to effective self-directed learning, and close out with a new segment tentatively called "Would you read the top article on Hacker News right now?".

Shownotes

• Minerva University
• [book] So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport
• [book] Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - Kenneth O. O. Stanley, Joel Lehman
• Jason Benn's website
• MLE Club