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

Does your summer roadtrip across America include Saturn V Rockets, self-driving cars, dinosaur bones, and maybe Kittyhawk? Well, then you might be Oz and family! Charlie and Oz catch up on Oz's grand tour of America's inspiring hubs of ambition and technology, with plenty of detouring into the wonderful book genre of video game memoirs.

Shownotes

• [book] Failure Is Not An Option - Gene Kranz
• [book] Skunkworks - Ben Rich
• [book] The Wright Brothers - David McCullough
• [book] Masters of Doom - David Kushner
• [documentary] Indie Game the Movie
• [book] Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games
• [book] The Making of Prince of Persia - Jordan Mechner
• [book] Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
• [song] "This song wrote itself" - Charlie's song about self-driving cars, performed in a self-driving car
• Hack Club's "Blot" pen plotter
• Hack Club

Programming is the best! We're chatting with Thorsten Ball (self-published author of Writing an Interpreter in Go and Writing a Compiler in Go) about all of our mutual favorite topics: learning new stuff, great textbooks, writing, and why bugs are actually great (a gift, even!).

Shownotes

• Writing an Interpreter in Go (Thorsten's book):
• Writing a Compiler in Go (Thorsten's book)
• The Dragon Book (compilers)
• Thorsten's newsletter:
• Thorsten's website
• Zed.dev
• Sourcegraph

Zach Latta is the founder of Hack Club (hackclub.com). Zach's a high school dropout who's now helped 30k high school students around the world start their own coding clubs. He also helped build the much-beloved "yo" texting app in 2014. This is a fun conversation about coding in school, being a kid, the importance of friendship in learning, and realizing that you can make awesome stuff with awesome people in this world.

Shownotes:

• Hack Club
• László Polgár
• Yo App:
• Neopets
• Putting the You in CPU
• Pizza Hut BOOK-IT Program

Oz and Charlie brainstorm their "Stripe Press for kids" publishing idea!

Shownotes:

• Klutz Press
• Charlie's blog post about Klutz Press
• Hacker News discussion about Charlie's Klutz Press blog
• Little Schemer: https://mitpress.mit.edu/978026256099...
• Abstract Algebra: A Student Friendly Approach: https://www.amazon.com/Abstract-Algeb...
• Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Syste...
• Intel Celeron
• The Diamond Age
• Quantum County
• Execute Program
• Mitsumasa Anno
• Oz's Requests for Collaboration

Brandon Hendrickson (creator of scienceisweird.com) says no one's ever asked him about the sabertooth tiger skull in his Zoom background - until now! Brandon's a teacher steeped in the ideas of Kieran Egan - a prolific educational theorist who believes the world is FASCINATING and that IMAGINATION is key to how we humans learn. We explore how Egan's approach could work for autodidact software engineers, offer untold book suggestions, and, of course, propose some ways that ChatGPT might be able to help us along the way.

Shownotes:

• Science is WEIRD
• Brandon's 2023 Astral Codex Ten book review contest winning review of Kieran Egan's THE EDUCATED MIND
• Kieran Egan (wikipedia)
• A New History of Greek Mathematics - Reviel Netz
• Die Hard water jug challenge
• XKCD someone is wrong on the internet