The CS Primer Show

Charlie and Oz reconnect after a year to tackle the question of our times: now that coding agents actually work, does learning computer science still matter — and is the agent an asset to your growth or a liability? They get into RLVR and why agents crossed the threshold, Amdahl's law as a metaphor for automated productivity, why Oz still wants everyone to write a little assembly, and the creeping fear that agents sap "the will to learn" the same way social media saps attention. 

Then the constructive turn: using agents to build your own challenges within your zone of proximal development, why you should read the back of the textbook chapter first, and Oz's homework for Charlie — figure out what you earnestly want to learn, not what you feel you should.

Shownotes:

• Steve Krouse of Val Town's post on why coding is still worth learning 
• Amdahl's law
• Vygotsky's zone of proximal development
• Bloom's 2 sigma problem
• Oz's blog
• Charlie's blog

Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall joins Oz and Charlie to dive into the joy and art of learning computer science. It's all here - achieving flow, "How to Solve It" by Polya, self-publishing guides/books on the web, Beej's take on AI and coding, and, of course, the origin of the "Beej Jorgensen" moniker. 

Shownotes:

• Beej's website: https://beej.us/
• Beej's guide to learning computer science: https://beej.us/guide/bglcs/
• Hacker News post on Charlie's short story about a giant diamond asteroid

Oz and Charlie vibe-chat their way through respective Mathacademy experiences + reviews, leading to a discussion of "binge learning" vs more-structured, consistent learning / time-tracking. Also, Oz shares that he's currently reading a math textbook with this incredible sentence in its introduction: "I consider the mathematical treatment of these problems to be among the chief glories of Western civilization, and I hope you agree."

Shownotes:

• mathacademy.com
• csprimer.com

There's something about MathAcademy that just works for learning math (for both kids and adults - ask Reddit!), and we're chatting with Justin Skycak - Chief Quant & Director of Analytics at MathAcademy - to try to figure it out.

Shownotes:

• justinmath.com -- Justin's personal website
• mathacademy.com
• 3blue1brown
• Cell biology by the numbers
• ExecuteProgram
• Star Trek 2009
• The Math Academy Way -- Math Academy's working draft book, authored by Justin, which answers the following questions: What techniques exist to maximize student learning and talent development, particularly in the context of math? Why are these techniques so impactful, and if they are indeed so impactful, then why are they so often absent from traditional classrooms? How does Math Academy leverage these techniques?
• Math Academy Origin Story, 2014-20 -- from Sandy & Jason's perspective, with a focus on how the original in-school program and early software came to be
• Math Academy Origin Story, 2019-23 -- from Justin's perspective, with a focus on teaching in that school program and getting the algorithms in place to turn it into a fully automated system
• News Articles about Math Academy's original in-school program
• Oz on X
• Charlie on X
• Oz's website
• Charlie's website

Ammar Mian is a software engineer and the co-founder of startup health tech company Malla - and another former student of Oz's and Bradfield School of Computer Science! Many software engineers daydream about starting their own company one day, so we've got Ammar on the show this week to give us the goods. Is it still fun? Can you still get into flow? Are you still coding? Does Oz want to die on Mars? All this and more!

Shownotes:

• Malla
• The Wiggles
• The Six Levels of Interaction with a System
• Zone of proximal development
• Red-bellied black snake
• Reentry [book] - more recent history of SpaceX
• Red Mars [book] - Kim Stanley Robinson

Madison Kanna is a lifelong learner and self-taught programmer who learns in public, and Madison joins Oz and Charlie to share tactics for getting things done (with their learning goals) - and the importance of having fun along the way when learning computer science.

Shownotes

• Madison Kanna's site
• The Cost of Forsaking C
• Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Ryan Holiday - Don't Talk about Writing a Novel

Jason Benn is an ML engineer and truly the epitome of a lifelong learner (Cal Newport even wrote about Jason in one of his books on learning!). Oz and Charlie catch up with Jason on his current self-directed ML sabbatical - which he's corralled into a co-working cohort called mleclub.com (similar to Recurse Center but with an ML / AI focus). We discuss the tactical, strategic, and emotional side to effective self-directed learning, and close out with a new segment tentatively called "Would you read the top article on Hacker News right now?".

Shownotes

• Minerva University 
• [book] So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport
• [book] Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - Kenneth O. O. Stanley, Joel Lehman
• Jason Benn's website 
• MLE Club

Does your summer roadtrip across America include Saturn V Rockets, self-driving cars, dinosaur bones, and maybe Kittyhawk? Well, then you might be Oz and family! Charlie and Oz catch up on Oz's grand tour of America's inspiring hubs of ambition and technology, with plenty of detouring into the wonderful book genre of video game memoirs.

Shownotes

• [book] Failure Is Not An Option - Gene Kranz
• [book] Skunkworks - Ben Rich
• [book] The Wright Brothers - David McCullough
• [book] Masters of Doom - David Kushner
• [documentary] Indie Game the Movie
• [book] Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games
• [book] The Making of Prince of Persia - Jordan Mechner
• [book] Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
• [song] "This song wrote itself" - Charlie's song about self-driving cars, performed in a self-driving car 
• Hack Club's "Blot" pen plotter 
• Hack Club

Programming is the best! We're chatting with Thorsten Ball (self-published author of Writing an Interpreter in Go and Writing a Compiler in Go) about all of our mutual favorite topics: learning new stuff, great textbooks, writing, and why bugs are actually great (a gift, even!).

Shownotes

• Writing an Interpreter in Go (Thorsten's book): 
• Writing a Compiler in Go (Thorsten's book) 
• The Dragon Book (compilers)
• Thorsten's newsletter: 
• Thorsten's website 
• Zed.dev 
• Sourcegraph 

Zach Latta is the founder of Hack Club (hackclub.com). Zach's a high school dropout who's now helped 30k high school students around the world start their own coding clubs. He also helped build the much-beloved "yo" texting app in 2014. This is a fun conversation about coding in school, being a kid, the importance of friendship in learning, and realizing that you can make awesome stuff with awesome people in this world.

Shownotes:

• Hack Club 
• László Polgár
• Yo App:
• Neopets
• Putting the You in CPU 
• Pizza Hut BOOK-IT Program