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2020 Goals: Updated Learning Plan

Published: December 15, 2019
Last Updated: December 5, 2020

It’s hard to write out a plan and then come back to it months or a year later and think what the hell was I smoking. But, for the future when I look back at this, I wasn’t smoking anything. Just naturally delusional.

This years goals reflect that I’m terrible at sticking with the books I think I’m going to read. So I’m only listing 4 books. Then I would like to actually write some blog entries, and remember things about the things I read and worked on last year, so I listed out a lot of posts I would like to write.

Books to Read

Finish Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (The Wizard Book)
Discrete Math and Functional Programming
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Posts to Write

Book Reviews:
Anger, Madness and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil and Creativity
The Organization Man
Violence and the Sacred
The One by Whom Scandal Comes
The Scapegoat
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
The Black Swan
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure
Any other books I read etc.
Technical Posts
Clojure, sequences part 2
SQL Server - Tables & Indexes
SQL Server - Statistics
SQL Server - SARGABLE Queries
SQL Server - Transactions
SQL Server - Tempdb & temp objects
SQL Server - Query Execution
SQL Server - Query Analysis
Building and Running Clojure From Source
Concurrency - Thread Pools
Concurrency - Async code and the TPL in C#
Concurrency - Things to watch for
Macros in Clojure
A Survey of MongoDB
A Survey of Redis
Other:
Summary of Girard’s mimetic theory and the origin of myth and religion
Summary of Anger, Madness and the Daimonic …
Summary of what Taleb is saying in Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and Antifragile

Projects:

Finish SICP exercises (Clojure/Scheme)
RSS project (web based RSS reader)
Monkey implementation in Clojure and F#
Others

Other:

Be able to run 5 miles
Weight to 180 lbs.
Only buy 10 books! (Read the old ones)

There’s a few goals I dragged over from the 2019 list, because I still want to do them. Overall the technical stuff is still working on the base to be able to better understand programming languages and compilers, realizing that it will take some time with other things going on.

I also have a parallel track not related to the technical which leaked through into some of the blog posts I’d like to write. I’m not sure where this track is going, but there are going to be some books fighting with the ones on the list here. So we’ll see what happens in 2020.