Monthly Recap - May 2023
A brief review of the latest posts and notes from Mostly Harmless Ideas.
Hey, folks! This is a short and friendly recap post to share with you some of my latest posts, notes, and news about the substack. You can subscribe to Mostly Harmless Ideas to access all previous and future posts for free, forever.
Latest posts
We started May with a technical writing guide. In this post, I shared my workflow for brainstorming, outlining, writing, and editing technical articles, plus some tips to avoid writer’s block and stay on schedule.
How to Write Technical Articles
Technical writing is one of the most useful skills you can develop. It is the sort of writing that is meant to inform, explain, or discuss a concrete, technical topic in a given domain of expertise. Technical writing is factual, logical, and often backed by evidence. It is also terse and devoid of unnecessary adornments, but it doesn’t need to be dead boring.
Then, a short essay on the two main paradigms for designing learning experiences, from tutorials to courses to full-blown college curricula.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Learning
The two predominant learning paradigms in almost every course, tutorial, career, and book are bottom-up and top-down. Their difference is in the order in which we introduce principles and applications. In bottom-up learning, we start from the principles and build up toward the applications. In contrast, top-down learning begins with a desired application and uncovers the principles as they are necessary.
And we crowned the month with my first collaboration, this time with
, my go-to expert in algorithmic and competitive programming. This essay discusses the merits and limitations of the competitive mindset in computer science education.The Competitive Mindset in CS Education
Competitive programming is a form of coding that involves solving algorithmic problems in competition with other coders, usually within some time and resource constraints. The most common competition format (e.g., the ICPC, International Collegiate Programming Contests) involves teams of 3 programmers solving short coding problems in real time. This activity requires an in-depth understanding of data structures and algorithms and fast thinking and coding skills.
Notes on Computer Science
Occasionally, I also like to explore topics in a lighter tone. Here are some of the thoughts I’ve shared recently on Notes.
On generative AI and creativity.
On the often misinterpreted Turing test.
And on the apparently contradictory function of human reasoning.
Work in progress
And that was it for May. I’m working on a few mid-sized posts for June that I think you’ll love. One is a comprehensive introduction to Computer Science, summarizing its main fields and concepts. Another is an introduction to Artificial Intelligence to show you how it’s not all about neural networks and chatbots. And there’s more, but those are surprises. Feel free to subscribe if you find these topics exciting!
Also, feel free to reply or comment in this post about your favorite topics and suggest any ideas you’d like me to write about :)