Using Skills
I’ve been feeling a little demotivated lately because I have not applied my Computer Science skills as much as I want to in a long time. I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work that I do but I don’t always have the opportunity to grow my technical skills.
A few weeks ago I discovered the OSSU Computer Science curriculum and I started working my way through some of the courses because I seem to have forgotten half of the things that I learned in college. This exercise was worthwhile because I remember more that I expected and have been more inspired than ever to actually do something with the knowledge that I have.
Earlier this week I read Paul’s blog post about porting dark from OCaml to F#. I forked the repo and started poking around to see if there was something I could do with my new found inspiration.
After a stumbling through a few things while getting started, I am really happy that I was able to make a small, but useful, contribution to the porting effort.
I went from not knowing OCaml, F#, or dark to shipping a PR in two days. I still don’t know OCaml, F#, or dark but I am optimistic that I can continue to figure things out. :)
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Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast
I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here …
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 2, 2026Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle
Musings from Robin Sloan: Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibratin…
via Information Overload April 2, 2026The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 2, 2026Generated by openring