My Journey

Last updated 4 months ago

My Journey

It feels a little egotistical to make a page titled "My Journey" when I haven't done anything special, but I thought it would be good for you to get an idea of how I learned and the types of resources I'm building this roadmap off of. A good chunk of the resources, questions, and problems I recommend come from one of these 3 courses (and a lot of math questions will come from ). I'll do my best to attribute directly when not already obvious.

I could work on an independent project in my AP CSA class after the AP exam, and I wanted to make a cool AI resource to help the people in my Hack Club self-study -> expected to spend a couple of weeks but I ended up falling in love. This is what I originally set out to make.
The journey
- Background:
  - Math knowledge ended at Algebra 2
  - I "knew how to code" and had a little bit of experience with Python (though I hadn't programmed in it for years).
- Used 's because I thought it was the best way to get started.
  - It was really good, but it went into a lot of things I wasn't interested in, and didn't go deep enough into others. Too "practical" for my tastes but what I would recommend for anybody else starting out.
- Felt like there were massive gaps in my knowledge, so I spent a little while getting a very high-level overview of the math using .
- Took Andrej Karpathy's
  - Realized that I now knew a lot of fundamental theory and had understood some tacit knowledge but couldn't program much without handholding
- Took independently
  - Felt like I already knew a lot, and wasted a lot of time doing things that weren't necessarily that important (this is on me and isn't a fault of the actual curriculum).
  - Felt like there was probably too much handholding in the programming and not enough in the theory. Because of the high amount of work the staff does on the backend with helper functions and the like, it often felt like the small programming problems I was working on were disconnected from the actual problem I was trying to solve. At the same time, if they hadn't handheld as much in the programming as they did, I probably would have given up midway through so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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Last updated 4 months ago

I could work on an independent project in my AP CSA class after the AP exam, and I wanted to make a cool AI resource to help the people in my Hack Club self-study -> expected to spend a couple of weeks but I ended up falling in love. This is what I originally set out to make.
The journey
- Background:
  - Math knowledge ended at Algebra 2
  - I "knew how to code" and had a little bit of experience with Python (though I hadn't programmed in it for years).
- Used 's because I thought it was the best way to get started.
  - It was really good, but it went into a lot of things I wasn't interested in, and didn't go deep enough into others. Too "practical" for my tastes but what I would recommend for anybody else starting out.
- Felt like there were massive gaps in my knowledge, so I spent a little while getting a very high-level overview of the math using .
- Took Andrej Karpathy's
  - Realized that I now knew a lot of fundamental theory and had understood some tacit knowledge but couldn't program much without handholding
- Took independently
  - Felt like I already knew a lot, and wasted a lot of time doing things that weren't necessarily that important (this is on me and isn't a fault of the actual curriculum).
  - Felt like there was probably too much handholding in the programming and not enough in the theory. Because of the high amount of work the staff does on the backend with helper functions and the like, it often felt like the small programming problems I was working on were disconnected from the actual problem I was trying to solve. At the same time, if they hadn't handheld as much in the programming as they did, I probably would have given up midway through so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.