Arthur, Author at Abstractaway

All Posts by Arthur

Learning to Program with the Wizard Book: First Pass

In this report I first detail the journey of my first pass through SICP in three parts, from piqued interest to conclusion (with a brief analysis of the data I gathered underway). Following that, I reflect on my learning and the contents and approach of SICP before concluding that SICP is fantastic.

Sheldon Axler’s Precalculus: 2nd ed, 0.3.78

A real number line showing from -3 to +3 with a few irrational constants along the way

I have embarked on a grand adventure to learn math well, which I may write more on in the future. This piece gives my solution to exercise 0.3.78 in Sheldon Axler’s Precalculus (2nd ed), and the process I went through to solve it. This piece partly functions as a test of the MathJax-Latex plugin for writing pretty maths.

What I Learnt Writing my First Test Suite

A medieval portrait of a scribe scribing away.

I recently wrote a test suite for a basic web application, which resulted in two different types of bugs surfacing… After spending a week avoiding working on the test suite. The experience of writing that first test suite has also lead me to a simple model of how testing works. Finally I give a brief summary of assorted learning nuggets.

Kinesthetic Sensations: the Making of a Toy Drawing Program

Renaissance painting of Apollo playing the viola.

I recently made four small arcade games using pygame & python, where the graphics were drawn by hand-code rather than external drawing programs. While the next planned game calls for more advanced graphics, I want to continue using my monochrome pygame-drawn approach. After I realized that a drawing program and the mapmaker program from my breakout game are roughly equal, I then experienced a bodily rush holding the structure of the future drawing program as a kinesthetic sensation, and as a result made a toy-sized drawing program (PaintyPaint) in a couple of hours.

Failure through Fixation

https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11033123455/

I recently experienced Einstellung and, despite realizing what was happening, I had no good strategy prepared for it and ended up handling the event in a suboptimal manner. The rest of this report details the particular Einstellung experience, but also ties in a few other aspects of learning and problem-solving.

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