Computing Without the Courses

Has anyone ever tried to collect the best blog posts educating about some computer science concept and compiled them into some kind of index?

You could probably get an excellent CS education by just spending 1000 hours reading and implementing the best blog posts out there

Grant Slatton, tweeting

If you do nothing else, go play the NandGame. It’s a fun game, doesn’t need you to learn any syntax, and gives you the assurance that computers are, in fact, built on very understandable basic components.

Canon

• Hexing the Technical Interview
• E. W. Dijkstra Archive
• What is Code?
• Modern Functional Programming: Part 2
• SomethingNew
• Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

Fundamentals

• The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
• Putting the “You” in CPU
• The Elements of Computing Systems, and the Nand2Tetris game
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets
• Data Compression Explained
• The Git Parable
• Teach Debugging
• Computer Science for The Busy Developer
• What To Know Before Debating Type Systems
• Computing History Hub

Distributed Systems

• Distributed Consensus Reading List
• Distributed systems for fun and profit

Databases

I have a special Databases page because they’re so fun, just a never-ending source of interesting ideas.

PL Theory

• Functors, Applicatives, And Monads In Pictures
• Crafting Interpreters

Crypto / Auth

• API Tokens: A Tedious Survey

Languages

• Go by Example
• Clojure for the Brave and True
• Learn You Some Erlang (for greater good)

Building abstractions

• Locality of Behaviour
• Writing good programming abstractions
• A Philosophy of Software Design – PDF
• CUPID—for joyful coding
• The Twelve-Factor App
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions

Code janitor tips

• Making Wrong Code Look Wrong
• HTTP API Design Guide
• Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
• Parse, don’t validate
• Thinking in Data

Data modelling

• The data model behind Notion’s flexibility

Browsers

• How Browsers Work

Misc.

We need visual programming. No, not like that.

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