Ask HN: What are you learning?

Try to take a ~30 minute nap in the evening somewhere that is quiet and comfortable but not the bed you sleep in. 4 hours isn't sustainable for long, but I've found a nap in the evening is sufficient to let me run effectively on 5-6 hours.

I say somewhere that isn't your bed because I've found that if you settle in the bed it can be far more difficult to get moving again, and also you can start to associate the bed with naps and have more difficulty getting to sleep when you mean to later, and staying asleep.

Thousands of people study about how to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard and other needless leetCode to “work at a FAANG” even though they don’t do that everyday.

What you study for an interview is unfortunately often only vaguely correlated with what you do on a job.

For no apparent reason ... sigh

Are you using any resources that you'd care to share?

It looks like theres basically two suggestions:

A) Following the same sort of curriculum a university would teach. I'd have to manage to dredge through the math, but I suppose it's possible but would lead to probably the most competence. Unfortunately however, I was hoping for the big MOOC sites to have more content. EdX has some decent introductory stuff but not much beyond that.

B) The other recommended way is the hobbyist way and what I suspect most other software people wouldnauggest which is just building shit that interests you, ignoring first principles. Unfortunately I'm not sure how this would work out, since my projects in any domain seem to be a bit, er, grand and you supposedly need a strong math background to build anything more than basic circuits.

I'd dread the math a lot less if it were more cut and dry. I wish I could just jump right to calc, differential equations, linear algebra, etc. But more realistically, it would involve me hunt and picking parts of algebra and embarrassingly even simpler stuff. I was looking at some Khan academy stuff and while it turns out I remember more than I thought, theres still plenty I had forgot even existed.

Another alternative that seems good, but not realistic is that there are some community colleges that have professional certificates that teach electronic circuits pretty quickly. Unfortunately this is prohibited by the absolutely fucked "residency requirements" for this state whereby I wont be a resident of my current state for years (at least for tuition purposes, I'm a resident for just about everything in a few months). Also those courses are all in person which, for some unique reasons dont fit my life situation.