Lessons Learned From Building a Second Brain
Introduction Recently I participated in the tenth cohort of a class called Building a Second Brain (also known as BASB). BASB, taught by Tiago Forte, teaches a unique system for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). It has been steadily gaining…
Book Summary: Steal Like An Artist
I just finished the book Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon the other day. It is a relatively short read, coming in at about 140 small pages with lots of fun pictures. But it is jam packed with good insight into how to be a better, happier, and…
My Experiences With Homeschooling
I was homeschooled growing up. And not just for a few early years, I was homeschooled for the whole thing. I never went to a normal school until I headed off to take community college classes at sixteen. Until then, the closest I got was going into…
Writing About What I Know
I want to create more Living Document style pages outlining topics I am learning and am familiar with These won't be tutorials, they will be more of a Reference, a way for me to outline the most important elements of these different tools, languages…
Kotlin Part 3: Control Flow & Equality Comparison
Welcome to part 3. Last time we got some basic printing and user input happening and went over variables. But now, we need to actually start doing different things depending on what the user types. In order to do that, there are two concepts that I…
Book Review: Bird by Bird
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott presents an interesting volume about writing. Although her focus is on fiction, much of the advice and ideas are applicable to other types of writing as well. As someone working to get better at non-fiction blogging, the…
Artificial Accountability
When sitting down to get work done, trying to follow through with a daily routine, or finding time to practice a new skill, it can be easy to get distracted. Your phone buzzes, or you get a notification, or you just feel a few moments of boredom and…
Android Basics: Introduction
Welcome to my Android Basics series! Throughout the coming posts I will introduce you to the fundamentals of building a high quality Android app from scratch. Starting from an empty Android Studio project, we will build out an entire app, following…
Music: A balance between novelty and comfort
We love music because it ties in repetition, familiarity, and predictability with a sense of creativity and excitement. Those first three elements are crucial because they give us a sense of comfort and satisfaction when we are listening, and…
Basic Anki Workflow
I wrote about spaced repetition systems (an approach to better learning and memory) recently, and in there was a brief section about Anki. I wanted to expand upon that and provide a guide on how to setup and use Anki, and provide a couple of tips…
Challenge: Three Months and a Day
Since finishing Write of Passage this past Wednesday, I have already found that I have been writing less frequently this last week. Without the pressure of the class, and without the need to attend several live sessions every week I am finding it…
Teaching Programming with Authentic Projects and SRS
Introduction As I teach programming, there are a few learning techniques I want to incorporate that I haven't seen integrated into other learning resources. I will admit, this effort is a little bit selfish on my part! These are elements that I…
Better Learning with Spaced Repetition
I would take a bet that every single one of you reading this post right now has at least a handful of new things that you are trying to learn. And whether practicing new skills or studying concepts, a significant part of the process will require…
Networking for Game Development
Introduction Video games can be very much a social experience. People like to hop in a game with their friends and either battle it out brawler style, join forces to destroy wave after wave of nazi zombies, or progress through a compelling story. But…
Content Review Week 1
I consume a decent amount of content in a week, and I feel like I'm not getting as much value out of it as I could. In order to fix that I have been starting to take notes on nearly all of the non-entertainment content that I consume. I haven't been…
Kotlin Part 2: Basic Syntax and First Project
Ok, so now that we have a working hello world program (yay!), today I want to go over the first proper project we will be building in this series, start covering the syntax of Kotlin, and using that syntax to make the first steps in the construction…
Kotlin Part 1: Environment & Hello World
Before diving into the actual syntax and details of programming with Kotlin, first we need to get an environment setup and lay the groundwork. For this series I am going to be using a couple of different tools, and so we might as well get those all…