rabbit hole learning

March 9, 2025

learning

Look everything up

Pretty much the best way to learn that I have found is to refrain from suprressing your innate curosity and let it go wild. Most of the time, you will encounter a term or concept that you do not know, instead of glancing at it briefly, go all in.

Google it, read the wiki page, found someone's blog post? Read it. Watch that youtube video (I only do this if it's not 3 hours like your average Sphaerophoria stream).

Dive head first into rabbit holes.

I'll outline an average day where I have two types of goals:

  • Concrete goals: Like finish implementing X feature in Y project
  • Loose goals: Learn about X or Y.

I will include rough timestamps but they are pretty much meaningless because productivity levels vary immensely throughout the day.

9:00 AM

  • Decided to learn about document parsing.
  • Links: EPUB specification,
  • I found out that EPUBs are just an archive with HTML, and nearly had a crisis. (Now I know.)
  • Immediate questions: so I need to parse the EPUB, extract metadata, fetch the XML and parse that too. Eventually I would have to use a WebView to render the HTML/CSS on the screen to render the book. (Unfortunate.)
  • Found out that in order to read the PDF spec, you need to pay like 350 swiss francs!
  • Spend time perusing SwiftUI docs, and asking grok about how I can render things on the screen with Swift.
  • Fiddle with XCode, marvel at how Swift gets pretty much everything right but uses func ... for declaring functions. It has Result<T, E> though, so forgiven.

11:00 AM

12:00 PM

  • Rabbit holed into learning so much about UTF-8
  • Bookmarked to learn more about UTF-8 and UTF-16 and writing a parser for it later (ILY @zack_overflow)

1:00 PM

  • Taking a break, lunch + watching a movie.

2:30 PM

3:30 PM

  • Shifted to working on memegrep(v2). This is where I already know the goals I want to accomplish before the day ends.
  • I implemented a pub/sub flow to help with scale when users upload their private memes.
  • Rough sketch in mind: 
    user uploads meme(s) → server receives req → insert skeleton into db → 
queue upload → return 201 to user immediately → worker picks up task
  • Spent the next 6 hours coding without even realizing 6 hours had passed (bliss)
  • Ended up with multi-file upload, search, deployed a CLIP model, added all the scaffolding needed in the UI for this.

9:30 PM

  • I posted something about pointers on twitter and ended up reading some history about the nomenclature just for fun.
  • Links: pointers, handles are the better pointers
  • Also saw something about reference counting being used in the libvips library earlier in the day, so decided to check out their implementation since i've only used it in rust quite often. reference counting, Rc and Arc

11:00 PM

  • Was in bed and saw a post linking an amazing article by Valve on Source Engine Networking, so ended up being a nice and light read.

At the end of the day I ended up with more questions, but I definitely had more answers than when I started!

Here's a DAG of my exploration for fun: