Thanks for your comments. I was aware that the initial delay in starting up can be seen as procrastination. I myself am not sure that's not the case, and that's the main reason why I bounce my ideas here. Maybe my comfy self is fooling me, but can it fool the YCnews swarm? ;) Let me add some more context, which I left out of the already long first post.
One crucial reason for quitting my job is indeed to focus on learning tasks I had set for myself. It's lack of focus, not time, what has been dragging me so far.
The first task is to finish absorbing SICP. I have read the book and watched the lectures before, but only as a quick first contact, skimming most of the latter parts and not doing the exercises. I've found that even this light exposure has made me a much better programmer. This time I'm going more exhaustively, writing down short summaries of the chapters and doing all the exercises as I find them.
As for math, I'm more interested in building some math muscle and intuition, rather than any specific knowledge. I have started reading Concrete Mathematics, by Knuth et al., and I find it very demanding but practicable. With my weak math background, this would take forever, and be too easy to put on hold, if I did it on the side of more urgent obligations. I tried.
I have other books and learning tasks in the backburner, but yes, those I can learn on the side. The above are the ones I want to finish before letting other focus consuming projects into my head.
I've found that the Archy-like editor project is a good playground for the ideas in SICP. The design is sound and well specified, so I can focus more on the programming part. I plan to use this as my hacking environment in the future.
I hope to be done earlier than four months with the tasks above. I'll try and hit two months, but I must admit my estimates are often short by a factor or pi, so a 2x padding seems right for a strict timebox.
There are other topics to reply; I'll do so in replies to the appropriate comments.
One crucial reason for quitting my job is indeed to focus on learning tasks I had set for myself. It's lack of focus, not time, what has been dragging me so far.
The first task is to finish absorbing SICP. I have read the book and watched the lectures before, but only as a quick first contact, skimming most of the latter parts and not doing the exercises. I've found that even this light exposure has made me a much better programmer. This time I'm going more exhaustively, writing down short summaries of the chapters and doing all the exercises as I find them.
As for math, I'm more interested in building some math muscle and intuition, rather than any specific knowledge. I have started reading Concrete Mathematics, by Knuth et al., and I find it very demanding but practicable. With my weak math background, this would take forever, and be too easy to put on hold, if I did it on the side of more urgent obligations. I tried.
I have other books and learning tasks in the backburner, but yes, those I can learn on the side. The above are the ones I want to finish before letting other focus consuming projects into my head.
I've found that the Archy-like editor project is a good playground for the ideas in SICP. The design is sound and well specified, so I can focus more on the programming part. I plan to use this as my hacking environment in the future.
I hope to be done earlier than four months with the tasks above. I'll try and hit two months, but I must admit my estimates are often short by a factor or pi, so a 2x padding seems right for a strict timebox.
There are other topics to reply; I'll do so in replies to the appropriate comments.