The CS Primer Show

Charlie and Oz reconnect after a year to tackle the question of our times: now that coding agents actually work, does learning computer science still matter — and is the agent an asset to your growth or a liability? They get into RLVR and why agents crossed the threshold, Amdahl's law as a metaphor for automated productivity, why Oz still wants everyone to write a little assembly, and the creeping...

Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall joins Oz and Charlie to dive into the joy and art of learning computer science. It's all here - achieving flow, "How to Solve It" by Polya, self-publishing guides/books on the web, Beej's take on AI and coding, and, of course, the origin of the "Beej Jorgensen" moniker.  Shownotes: Beej's website: https://beej.us/ Beej's guide to learning computer science: https://beej....

Oz and Charlie vibe-chat their way through respective Mathacademy experiences + reviews, leading to a discussion of "binge learning" vs more-structured, consistent learning / time-tracking. Also, Oz shares that he's currently reading a math textbook with this incredible sentence in its introduction: "I consider the mathematical treatment of these problems to be among the chief glories of Western c...

There's something about MathAcademy that just works for learning math (for both kids and adults - ask Reddit!), and we're chatting with Justin Skycak - Chief Quant & Director of Analytics at MathAcademy - to try to figure it out. Shownotes: justinmath.com -- Justin's personal website mathacademy.com 3blue1brown Cell biology by the numbers ExecuteProgram Star Trek 2009 The Math Academy Way -- M...

Ammar Mian is a software engineer and the co-founder of startup health tech company Malla - and another former student of Oz's and Bradfield School of Computer Science! Many software engineers daydream about starting their own company one day, so we've got Ammar on the show this week to give us the goods. Is it still fun? Can you still get into flow? Are you still coding? Does Oz want to die on Ma...

Madison Kanna is a lifelong learner and self-taught programmer who learns in public, and Madison joins Oz and Charlie to share tactics for getting things done (with their learning goals) - and the importance of having fun along the way when learning computer science. Shownotes Madison Kanna's site The Cost of Forsaking C Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Ryan Holiday - Don't Talk about Writing a Nove...

Jason Benn is an ML engineer and truly the epitome of a lifelong learner (Cal Newport even wrote about Jason in one of his books on learning!). Oz and Charlie catch up with Jason on his current self-directed ML sabbatical - which he's corralled into a co-working cohort called mleclub.com (similar to Recurse Center but with an ML / AI focus). We discuss the tactical, strategic, and emotional side t...

Does your summer roadtrip across America include Saturn V Rockets, self-driving cars, dinosaur bones, and maybe Kittyhawk? Well, then you might be Oz and family! Charlie and Oz catch up on Oz's grand tour of America's inspiring hubs of ambition and technology, with plenty of detouring into the wonderful book genre of video game memoirs. Shownotes [book] Failure Is Not An Option - Gene Kranz [book]...

Programming is the best! We're chatting with Thorsten Ball (self-published author of Writing an Interpreter in Go and Writing a Compiler in Go) about all of our mutual favorite topics: learning new stuff, great textbooks, writing, and why bugs are actually great (a gift, even!). Shownotes Writing an Interpreter in Go (Thorsten's book):  Writing a Compiler in Go (Thorsten's book)  The Dragon Book (...

Zach Latta is the founder of Hack Club (hackclub.com). Zach's a high school dropout who's now helped 30k high school students around the world start their own coding clubs. He also helped build the much-beloved "yo" texting app in 2014. This is a fun conversation about coding in school, being a kid, the importance of friendship in learning, and realizing that you can make awesome stuff with awesom...

Oz and Charlie brainstorm their "Stripe Press for kids" publishing idea!  Shownotes: Klutz Press Charlie's blog post about Klutz Press Hacker News discussion about Charlie's Klutz Press blog Little Schemer : https://mitpress.mit.edu/978026256099... Abstract Algebra: A Student Friendly Approach : https://www.amazon.com/Abstract-Algeb... Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective : https://www.ama...

Brandon Hendrickson (creator of scienceisweird.com) says no one's ever asked him about the sabertooth tiger skull in his Zoom background - until now! Brandon's a teacher steeped in the ideas of Kieran Egan - a prolific educational theorist who believes the world is FASCINATING and that IMAGINATION is key to how we humans learn. We explore how Egan's approach could work for autodidact software engi...

Brit Cruise creates educational videos, learning experiments, and other amazing things that "connect young people with their futures as young as possible." He's worked with Khan Academy, Codecademy,  Pixar, Disney, Unity, and more to conjure up magical educational experiences for kids. Shownotes: Brit Cruise's website Storyxperiential X in a Box Art of the Problem Pixar in a Box Khan Academy   Jam...

Charlie wants to talk about the latest Paul Graham essay "How to Do Great Work" and Oz wants to talk about jiu-jitsu (again). Show notes: How to Do Great Work - Paul Graham   You and Your Research - Richard Hamming " Jozef Chen On Rapid Learning From Jiu-Jitsu Instructionals & Technique Tinkering" Jozef Chen recent competition victory Mikey Musumeci on Joe Rogan "There's no speed limit" - Dere...

We're joined by the co-founders of Warpstream Labs, Richie Artoul and Ryan Worl, to talk about how exploring your curiosity as a software engineer can lead to all sorts of interesting avenues and opportunities, like going from a coding bootcamp grad to building Warpstream - a Kafka-compatible data streaming platform. You may remember Richie from our previous podcast Escaping Web! Richie is one of...

Linda Liukas (author and illustrator of HELLO RUBY - "the world's most whimsical way to learn about computers, technology and programming") joins Oz and Charlie to discuss how and why we love our computers, lessons learned from teaching kids about computer science using paper and scissors and glue, and Linda's latest project - designing an outside playground in Helsinki as a computer you can play...

We're joined by Jon Gertner (author of THE IDEA FACTORY: BELL LABS AND THE GREAT AGE OF AMERICAN INNOVATION) and Jimmy Soni (author of A MIND AT PLAY: HOW CLAUDE SHANNON INVENTED THE INFORMATION AGE) to discuss our favorite "house of magic" - Bell Labs!  Can Bell Labs ever be recreated? What would Claude Shannon think of ChatGPT? What can we learn about "doing great things" from Bell Labs? Shownot...

Steve Krouse is the founder of val.town, a social network where you write and run - and maybe poke - code?  Steve's a fellow computer science education and developer tools enthusiast. We explore what makes programming fun - and how tools like val.town might just be able to recapture that joy we've all felt with computers before. Shownotes: val.town Steve Krouse   Seymour Papert Mindstorms by Seymo...

Are we creating evil in the world with this podcast? Should Charlie feel guilty about playing Zelda? Do any Oz-approved video games exist? What's going on with Charlie's book? Can we use GPT-4 as an effective personal tutor? And should we stop doing this podcast? Shownotes: Khanmigo (Khan Academy) Silicon Zeroes Shenzhen I/O Human Resource Machine

It's time for instructional design and ed-tech history with Jesse Farmer!  Jesse is the co-founder, Chief Product Officer, and academics lead of Dev Bootcamp - one of the earliest, most influential, and successful coding bootcamps - the bootcamp that started it all! Shownotes: Dev Bootcamp Hipcamp Jesse Farmer's Mastodon account

Charlie wants to know if he can learn how to "think like an engineer", just like the Matt Damon/Mark Watney character in THE MARTIAN -- and Oz has some good suggestions, as per usual. Shownotes: Von Neumann probes   We Are Legion (We Are Bob) - Dennis E. Taylor Nibbles - Charlie's short story about von Neumann probes   The Martian - Andy Weir :  Shimmer - Charlie's short story about mining a giant...

Omar Rayward attended one of the first ever coding bootcamp cohorts, now he's a Senior Staff Software Engineer. Oz and Charlie connect with Omar about his study habits, motivation, and whatever else it takes to keep up his consistent learning habits. Shownotes: How to be consistent (Oz's recent article, featuring Omar!)

Charlie's unexpected packet loss devolves into a live Oz networking lesson. * Matt's (my) traceroute * How Verizon and a BGP Optimizer Knocked Large Parts of the Internet Offline Today * Border Gateway Protocol * Christmas Day Bug on ARPANET (grep for Christmas in 1973 section) * Great horned owl

Oz and Charlie catch up with Felix Tripier - now a Senior Staff Software Engineer at quantum computing company IonQ - for the first time in three years! Felix was our first guest on Escaping Web - a double high school and college dropout who become a self-taught web developer and is now a quantum computing engineer - so it only made sense for him to be our first guest on The CS Primer Show. We dis...

Is there a benefit to figuring things out the hard way? Why learn to read disassembly if you can just ask Chat GPT. We talk about this, as well as somehow the Piet programming language and much more. Piet programming language