About

Welcome!

My name is Andrew. I am a former historian and current networker at a small university in New York.

This site journals my thoughts and journey to think like a computer.

This journey stems from my desire to understand a fundamental technology of our time - the manipulation of bits. I use Python regularly to build apps and automate networks. However, because Python is a relatively abstracted language that pulls from many external libraries, I feel like I am only doing surface level work by using programs that others have written and not interacting with my device at all. This distance has prompted me to dig deeper. In an initial attempt to fill that distance, I tried to learn C but I could not conceptually grasp what I was doing and programs I wrote did not work properly. This deficiency and watching a video about the C language where Linus Torvalds says “If you think like a computer, writing C makes sense” solidified the necessity for me to go down the path of understanding how programs work at a lower level, interact with hardware, and to think like a computer.

I am following the Teach Yourself Computer Science curriculum to fill this conceptual and experiential gap. I have reviewed other resources, but TYCS seems the best suited for me because the books and lectures offer depth and theory, as opposed to teaching me how to program as quickly as possible to make money. I started to read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and was blown away. It opened my mind to think about technology and programming as forms of human thought. My goal is to go through each section, book, and lecture in TYCS and to become a self-taught programmer so I can understand how bits move and alter our reality.

I hope you can gain something from looking over these crumbs of thought.