I finished CS50x, Harvard’s introduction to computer science, and got the certificate. Here are a few honest thoughts about it.

Why I took it

I’ve downloaded and touched a million different languages and never really had a foundation or actually know them. I knew how to make things work, but I didn’t understand them. CS50 felt like the right way to finally build that foundation properly.

What stood out

• C. C was the worst part. Pointers, memory allocation, the fact that every byte you touch is on you. I really hate low level languages but I understand they’re faster, and are the backbone every other language that is higher level. It makes me appreciate every other language.
• The psets. The problem sets are genuinely hard in a good way. Tideman, speller, recovery with raw bytes from a memory card. Each one had a moment where it felt very, very hard, but the sections and shorts really help.
• David Malan. He makes even the driest topics (pointers!!!) feel exciting. The lecture style is unlike anything I’ve seen in a free course.
• The community. CS50.ai as a helper and the in-depth pset descriptions are legitimately great when you’re stuck on a pset.

What I actually got out of it

Beyond the certificate: a way of thinking. I stopped treating programs as things you write and start treating them as things you reason about. Memory, recursion, data structures, how a computer actually executes your code. None of that was in my brain before.

What’s next

I’m taking a break as CS50x was a large snowball of information, but I might consider CS50’s other courses, like CS50P.

If you’re thinking of doing it: the course is free, self-paced, and you can submit everything at your own speed. Just start. The first lecture is the hardest part, not because it’s difficult, but because it means deciding to begin.

Hi. This is the first post on a site that’s been in the works for quite a while.

Why this exists

Three reasons, roughly in order of importance:

1. To force depth. Writing is the best way I know to find out whether I actually understand something. If I can’t explain it in my own words, I don’t understand it yet.
2. To have a home. I have things all over the place on different platforms and websites, but to have one site where anyone can visit and get to know me is nice.
3. To be findable. I’ve learned a huge amount from other people’s blogs. It’s time to give something back.

What’s under the hood

The site runs on Eleventy (11ty) with Nunjucks templates. No build tools, no bundler, no framework. Just a static site generator and a single hand-written stylesheet. It’s fast, it’s simple, and highly minimal.

What I want to write about

A few topics I’m excited to pull on:

• UI design. I’m really passionate about making things enjoyable to use.
• AI and what it’s doing for the future of programming and software development.
• Linux in both perspectives as a personal desktop and servers. (Why do people use Windows Server?)

A note on consistency

I don’t know how often I’ll post. Life and school get in the way, motivation comes and goes. Showing up is more important than being impressive.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Say hi in the guestbook. I do actually read those!