A guide to Mostly Harmless Ideas
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A guide to Mostly Harmless Ideas
An updated summary of everything you can read in this substack so far.
Welcome!
This post indexes the most relevant content I’ve posted so far. These are long-format, evergreen, educational posts on many topics in Computer Science written for a broad audience. This summary does not include interviews, discussions, insider posts, or other casual articles. You can always see everything in the archive.
If you’re new to this substack, this is a guide to exploring the topics I’ve written about. If you’re a regular reader, this may be a chance to find an interesting older post you might have missed or to fill any gaps in previous articles you’ve read.
I’ll keep this post updated with links to all articles organized in a way that’s easy to browse, depending on your interests and background, and I will send bi-monthly updates via email to you.
I hope you find something interesting to read!
Introduction to Computer Science
Articles in the Intro to CS section are meant to work as introductory topics on Computer Science, suitable for all audiences. I write them thinking mostly about people coming from outside to the world of Computer Science: students, professionals from other domains, journalists, or just laypeople interested in knowing what this is about.
You can start reading the following post that summarizes. the whole field:
Foundations of Machine Learning
Once you read that big post, you can explore the series on the Foundations of Machine Learning.
(This is an ongoing series. I will link to all posts here as they are published.)
Individual articles
I also write individual articles on specific algorithms or concepts. These need not be read in any specific order.
Technical Guides
In the Guides section, you will find how-to articles related to technical writing. The first article in the series details a loose process you can use for writing technical articles:
The second article explains the why-what-how framework as a way to structure technical articles to ensure your reader is engaged.
(This is an ongoing series. I will link to all posts here as they are published.)
Essays on Science and Education
Essays are opinionated on the subjects I care about most, mostly science and education. I wrote a long rant on improving peer review by adopting an open-source ethos.
And I’ve written a few essays on teaching principles and education in general. These two are about changing the mindset from individual quantitative evaluation to a more team-based and project-based framework.
This one is about how to structure educational content, from theory to applications, or the other way around, depending on the nature of the material.
And this essay is the benefits and drawbacks of nurturing a competitive mindset in computer science education.
Great Ideas in Computer Science
The Great Ideas in Computer Science section is a long-term project of mapping out the history of Computer Science from the point of view of the most relevant ideas in the field. It will be divided into arcs or series of 5 or so posts.
The first series is the Origin Arc, a story that spans from ancient computing devices to Alan Turing building the first general-purpose computer and establishing the foundational theory of the field.
The first entry in the series focuses on Leibniz’s dream of a computational language.
(This is an ongoing series. I will link to all posts here as they are published.)
Philosophy of Computer Science
The Philosophy section is where I explore the philosophical implications of Computer Science. The first article is about the nature of thinking, a non-traditional reading of TUring’s seminal paper where he defines the Turing Test.
Final words
This article is not a comprehensive list of everything I’ve written, but an overview of the most relevant and, in my opinion, interesting posts. You can check everythingelse in the archive.
I hope these links provide you with some insightful or at least intriguing topics to read about. Let me know if you’d like me to deeper into any of these topics. It’s the opinion of readers like you that really fuel my desires to write more.
A guide to Mostly Harmless Ideas
This is great. I need to create something like this for my readers. Thanks for the reminder!