RC curriculum

I am about to start a session at the Recurse Center in NYC! My list of things to learn and do has vastly outpaced what I was able to accomplish in nights and weekends with a full time job and I was looking for a place to focus on exploring computer science in the absence of Outlook and meetings. In addition to fundamental computer science topics, I plan to take a look a closer look the technical developments in the blockchain space as well.

Fundamentals:

Blockchain

Projects

A basic blockchain
A merkle tree which syncs state to a hot-standby for node failover
Add a zero-knowledge security layer to the blockchain using zkSnarks
Try to apply some game theory concepts to the blockchain
Maybe some other crazy stuff like auto generating a smart contract from a body of text

Pretty amazing that all these resources are free and readily available - the internet really is magnificent. It is extremely unlikely I will get through all of that in three months, but its probably better to have a list that is too long rather than too short.

Some stuff that didn’t make the cut:

Emulate a goroutine in C
Psuedowire support in docker - point-to-point connections between containers
Chrome plugin to quantify your reading habits (topic focus, word counts, etc.)
Blockchain for distributed consensus on shared document edits
Code up some evolutionary algorithms and let them interact in a network of containers
Automatic code refactorer
Research feed pulling from arxiv, conferences, tech meetups
Implement TCP
Tool which allows you to tweak the state of a router in a network and gives you visual feedback on the state changes and new states of other nodes
Extract transition probabilities between words from a body of english text
Torrent network with docker containers
Implement a basic OS in a purely functional language
Implement the keberos protocol
Do a kaggle competition
Replicate results in some ML papers

Written on August 12, 2018