Today I learned a bit of Clojure, and learned about a Julia plotting library called Gadfly.jl But it didn’t feel super productive, and now I’m thinking a bit about what my goals for Hacker School are. I think they’re something like:

1. Contribute to open source projects! This is happening.
2. Write a non-trivial piece of software from scratch that I feel good about the design of. This is not happening at all. Still hunting for something which is the right size and which I can care about enough to do it.
3. Feel better about my ability to design good code. Also not happening yet.
4. Learn about concurrency, because I don’t even.
5. Learn about how to write practical functional programs.

To address #3, I think I need to spend more time reading well-written code. I’m still not sure about #2. Or #4. Or #5.

So far the things that have taught me the most were:

• doing a bit of async programming
• Learning about how Python bytecode works

Maybe writing a Javascript interpreter would be a fun way to address numbers 2, 3, and 4?