#040: Wander Around a Digital Garden, Make Your Own Programming Language, Making Friends As An Adult

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week we'll explore digital gardens and campfires, how to make your own programming language, bite-sized lessons to help improve your computer literacy, and more. Let's dive in:

Wander Around a Digital Garden

​Chloe Yan might have made one of the coziest personal sites you'll find on the internet. It's styled as a personal garden, with each tiny aspect leading you to various pieces of work she has done such as creating her own digital spaces, shaders, and interface ideas.

It's a beautiful example of how your personal site allows you to showcase who you are as a person, what you value, and how you can bring a human element to the digital world. One of my favorite digital spaces she created was a virtual tiny campsite - inspired by nights spent playing Club Penguin, she recreated a space of 'warmth and slowness' that is increasingly rare to find online.

Making Your Own Programming Language

In the words of @ubermenchh_ on Twitter:

The book being described is called Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom. It walks you through everything you need to know about implementing a full-featured, efficient scripting language. For more ebook formats, be sure to visit the official website.

How to Make Friends As an Adult

Making friends at any age isn't easy, but making new ones as an adult is especially challenging. That's why I was extremely happy to comes across an article from @rrhoover appropriately titled, "How to Make New Friends As An Adult".

In an increasingly remote working world, these skills will become even more valuable to obtain. He opines that 'social sports' may be one way to spark a connection. This includes running, cycling, golf, tennis, rock climbing, basketball, soccer, skiing, and surfing. It's an interesting idea, and worth exploring when it comes to learning how to approach and converse with other people.

Bite-Sized Machine Learning Challenges

If you're looking to practice your Machine Learning skills, one of the best sites I have come across lately is Deep-ML. It has Leetcode style problems that range in difficulty from easy to hard, and fall under different types of categories such as linear algebra, deep learning, and machine learning.

You'll find challenges such as transposing a matrix, simulating a single neuron with back propagation, writing a decision tree learning algorithm, and more. It's a beautifully simple site that will sharpen your mind, and we are very thankful for @rohanpaul_ai for putting this on our radar.

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

​@var_epsilon asked on Twitter:

Some of the best responses to this were Wizard Zines, The Missing Semester of Your CS Education, and The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (what a mouthful!)

Each of these sites contain a combination a bite-sized lessons that, exactly how varepsilon asked in their original question, are digestible in small half-hour sets. You'll be able to explore topics like How Git Works, Security and Cryptography, Data Wrangling, and more.

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J.B.