Nand2Tetris and following commitments

One of my new years resolutions was to write more blog posts. I placed a conservative (to me) goal of writing at least 1 blog post per month. Somewhat of an arbitrary milestone, but since my goal was to place my thoughts out into the world and create more technical content I thought it would be a good place to start. I broke my resolution after the second month.

See, it can be hard to know what to write about if you are unsure whether the content that you are writing has been written by someone else, or you don’t think of it as particularly original. I sure don’t think I’m (currently) and innovator, but I’d like to think I could one day become one. The impostor syndrome can be strong sometimes and I have to admit I haven’t boasted of excessive confidence throughout my life. However I have come to the conclusion I am not the one to judge whether I something I write is worth reading, someone else will have to be the judge of that. I can only judge whether something is worth writing.

Learning something new

I did not take a computer architecture course in college. Going to a liberal arts college has had its advantages, but I always thought there was something missing in my fundamental understanding of how computer worked from the ground up, including the hardware that made them work. I had heard through a certain technical forum on the web that there was a book with and adjacent course called Nand2Tetris that was meant to teach the reader how did computers work under the hood, starting from the basic hardware logic gates. I bought it sometime ago meaning to read it, but it started getting dust in my shelf. A couple of weeks ago after reading a twitter post of someone in the information security community recommending it I decided to give it a try. While I have only finished my first chapter I have to say it is great. There is so much detail and the exercises included really help you understand the material (if only math textbooks were as thorough!).

The entire Nand2Tetris course is at least a semester long course, and today is the last day of March. I hope I can finish the course by August, but we’ll see how I do. My goal is to learn a lot and have fun along the way. That is all I’ve got for now, wish me luck!