What I’m Doing Now

In the Foreground

I’m Preparing For University

Over the next year I’ll be studying an Access to Higher Education course in Computing alongside A level Maths with the intention of going on to study Computer Science at university. I figure such an extended period of time under expert guidance studying the principles on which these magical machines are built and the practice of effectively manipulating them will grant me great foundational knowledge that I can build upon for decades to come.

In the Middleground

I’m Working Through HtDP

How to Design Programs teaches the craft of good programming. The focus is on the principles of systematic program design that can be applied to produce systematically designed programs across a variety of programming languages and problems.

In the end, it’s likely to have taken a few hundred hours to go through the second edition’s 754 pages and 528 exercises. Thus far I’m around eighty-percent of the way through and it brings me great joy that programs I now write are substantially better than they were previously.

I’m Reading More Fiction

For the last few years I’ve been an avid reader, though the vast majority of the books I’ve read thus far have been non-fiction, particularly in the domains of philosophy and technology with some others surrounding relationships, art and general self-help. More recently, however, I’ve been enjoying Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels and would particularly recommend William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy.

In the Background

I’m Figuring Out What It Means To Be Autistic

I don’t know what led me to read Annie Kotowicz’s What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic and Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism, but I found myself relating to the autistic experience as described by them. Does that mean I’m autistic? I don’t know.

I’m less bothered about formal diagnosis or confirmation. I don’t care about whether or not the label autistic accurately describes me. I’m more interested in gaining a better understanding of how I experience the world and why. Viewing things through the lens of autism seems to help that, and that’s good enough for me.