9: Ep. 9 | Learning how to learn

Jon (00:00) Hey everyone, welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast where we discuss our code commits, our personal commitments and other related topics. Your host today, John, is joined by Bethany, Erica and Brittany. We are software engineers who initially met as a new hire group at GitHub. However, we found a common interest in continuous learning and building interesting projects and we decided to start this pod together.

We continue to meet to share our learning experiences and discuss our lives as developers. Whether you’re pushing code or taking on new challenges, we’re happy you’re listening. Today’s episode focuses on learning. We’re going to discuss things we want to learn, what we’re learning now, how that fits into our careers, and different strategies and tools we have.

That sound good. Okay, so I guess we can start off with, know, this is actually a topic I’m excited to talk about. Like, what are our topics we want to learn for each kind of short, medium, and long term? like, how do you all prioritize what these topics are? And like, yeah, I’m really curious to know, like, why do you want to learn X?

Erika (01:00) Yeah, I don’t think I had…

really explicitly thought of my learning topics in short, medium, and long term before, but I realized that I do naturally prioritize things that are more pressing and relevant to my job and my day to day. So right now that’s, like I try to think of like, am I weakest in? What do I really need to learn to be better at my job? And right now that’s Ruby on Rails. So I’m

I’ve done Ruby learning in the past, but I feel like I’m at that cusp of intermediate to expert. So I’m really trying to push past the intermediate level and dig deeper. So I’m doing that because I’m developing a lot in Ruby on Rails, and I want to be faster. I want to be more proficient and bright.

better code. But then long term, I think of all sorts of things that I want to learn about, computer science fundamentals. And then I’ve always loved robotics and hardware, but I never make time to do it, invest in it, purchase anything. But I have this dream that I’ll have some kind of robotics.

lab in my garage at some point and it interests me so that’s why I want to learn about that at some point. Yeah, but maybe when I have a little less going on in my day-to-day work.

Jon (02:25) Yeah, so I’m doing an online master’s at Georgia Tech and there’s seminars that are offered. And I took one in robotics. And I don’t really know a ton about robotics. was like every week we would, someone would present the robotics research. we had this person, she was like, she worked at JPL and she did like, she focused on like.

She was like a roboticist, like a scientist, and she focused on like the wheels of like the Mars rovers and how they interact with like Martian sand. We had like someone from Nvidia come and Nvidia is all about like using, you know, basically neural networks to train, use like reinforcement learning to train robotics. And yeah, there’s, I like really didn’t know what people were talking about most of the time. And there’s a ton of robotics stuff I wanna learn, but yeah, it is, it does feel like.

Robotics is the future. And no, that’s cool. I’m similar. Like, it would be cool to build a robot and program a robot. That’s been on my to-do list.

Brittany (03:17) So I usually am a lot more organized about what I want to learn. One thing that I do is I follow the, para, para.

areas, resources, archive to organize all of my notes and whenever I get new information, there’s just so much information out there. I dump it into a file that’s related to it so that when I am ready to go learn about something, then I have a list of all of the things that people are like, hey, you should check out this resource on that thing. Right now, what I’m really interested in learning are…

Prompt engineering, I know, I’m sorry to be that, that person, I know that’s really overdone right now, but I have quite a few resources related to prompt engineering that I have saved that I feel like it’s time for me to learn more about. Um, and also Kubernetes, I think that that’s an area that I’m super weak on and just like managing infrastructure in general. That’s something that I know that I would like to get better at. Uh, so that’s something that I’m hoping to focus on.

Jon (04:18) Bethany do you want to talk about?

Bethany (04:20) Yeah, I am jealous of you all because I have zero prioritization with what I learn. feel like I will go after whatever is the first thing in my brain. So this forced me to kind of try to figure out how I would prioritize it if I had priorities. But I would say that I definitely split it into like work and non-work learning.

So I would say for not work, I’ve mentioned this a couple times I think on the podcast, but I’ve been, I really want to make a blog, but I want to design it and build it myself. Like I don’t know why I have this strong urge to just make something that feels unique to myself. But I am very not artistic, just was not gifted with artistic traits at all for at least visual art.

And so I was initially taking like a React course, which was great, but I realized that I just had no idea how to design a webpage. And so I ended up signing up for this course called the Art of Visual Design. And so far it’s been really helpful for actually putting a process down for…

design, which is helpful for my brain. I need a process to go down because it’s one of those things where I feel like I know good design when I see it, but I can’t just pull it out of thin air. So it’s been very helpful for that. And I’m starting to, I think, get ideas for how I want to design my blog. And I think it actually will make the React part easier.

because I’ve been learning how to design in Figma and that really helps with figuring out what CSS elements I need and everything. So highly recommend that course. And on the work side, as I mentioned, I work on Co-Pilot API, which is actually fairly decoupled from the actual prompting part or the LLM actual inference part.

and so I just love to learn more about both of those sides of the equation. we recently had an offsite where there was some, like a prompting workshop and that was really fun to learn about and learn what users of our application, like what their interaction is. and I really want to learn more about the infrastructure part of LLMs because I would love to just understand how to make a better service for.

for everyone who uses our platform.

Jon (06:39) I feel like we have, yeah, we definitely have a lot of overlap. I mean, I wanna learn basically all the things you guys are trying to learn. It’s hard. There’s so much I feel that I wanna learn. Prioritizing is difficult. I think, yeah, I’ve kind of, with my sort of newfound free time, I’m trying to really think about things that I can learn. So I think one thing is there’s this website called Math Academy. I think I mentioned it to you.

Pretty cool website. It kind of uses spaced repetition and chunked learning, are just learning research. And it has a semantic graph of mathematical knowledge, because math is really pre-rec based. You have to master addition before you can do calculus. And so I want to go through. They have a machine, math machine learning track. I want to go through that.

As I mentioned, I’m doing a master’s program and I’m of accelerating that. I’m taking a natural language processing course, is kind of basically just going to be like, it’s starting next week. I think it’s going to be a lot of like classical NLP, and then just like older neural net, like recurrent neural nets, and then like LLM stuff, like transformer architecture stuff. So I think that stuff I want to spend.

I want to focus on machine learning. think that’s where my masters has been. I’m also taking a seminar on LLMs that’s on the human computer interaction of LLMs. I actually signed up for that yesterday because I was like, hey, got some time. Might as well add another. There’s a few books. I have a book called Deep Learning from Scratch, which just builds neural network primitives using NumPy.

which has been something I want to do really just like, think, think built like, like, I think the two things I want to do are like, write some of these neural network permit, like algorithms from scratch, like back propagation and like implement like Gaussian mixture model and naive Bayes, like just using, just using like NumPy. And then I’ve, I’ve been saying, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve want to do this for like a long time, but just like do Kaggle competitions, even like archived ones that aren’t live. Cause I think that’s how people really.

kind of learn machine learning. But yeah, so that’s me. And I think when I was at GitHub, and I might continue this as like, just like database stuff, I think there’s just like infinite knowledge with databases. might, if I sort of decide to kind of continue down the database world, I might try to.

you know, maybe read a book on relational database internals or something.

Erika (08:57) Yeah, what you were saying too kind of made me think of like one other aspect of prioritization is not only like timing, but like the depth that you go in to each subject. like sometimes you might prioritize like a short term subject and only learn like.

certain level of knowledge or you’ll kind of say I need to skill up in this particular area like for Ruby or for Ruby on Rails as an example like okay I’m gonna do a lot of like active record work I need to learn specifically about active record and like these are the questions that I need to be able to answer and like I don’t need to learn everything but this like one specific topic this one scope and you can go from everything to like getting a summary

and knowing general high level down to reading the source code and running it yourself or contributing. There’s all sorts of levels that you can take in whatever you’re learning. yeah, I think what you were talking about is very descriptive of the topic overall and different ways you can approach it and different layers of approaching.

what you’re learning, which is cool to kind of hear about as somebody who doesn’t know anything about machine learning.

Jon (10:13) Yeah, and I think that segway is kind of into the next part, next thing we’re gonna talk about, like strategies for effective learning. like, you know, I think, totally, like there’s kind of, you know, I think when you’re in school, you try to learn everything, or at least when I was in school, I was kind of a learning maximalist. Like I wanted to learn everything, but like you kind of, it’s just kind of just impossible. I mean, it just is impossible when you enter, you know, there’s…

There are people who spend their entire lives studying a small sliver of computer networking, whatever. And I definitely struggle with, I feel like I get greedy and I wanna learn everything and then, I struggle with just focus. So yeah, so what are some, guess, you guys learn or used to learn?

Yeah, and kind of like how do you, like what things have worked well for you and what things do you think work well in general?

I can start. But yeah, I think having a problem in project-based learning has just proven to be absolutely works well for me. I also feel like I learn way better when it’s social, like when I’m learning with other people. Or even when I’m in a class, even if I’m not interacting with any other people, there’s just a…

you know, a social aspect to it that I think makes me feel like A, the topic is like, kind of validates that the topic is like useful and important and B, keeps me accountable. What about you all?

Erika (11:35) kind of like sort of meta.

strategy description, but and it also like shows how how lazy I am, but like I need like like I need time boxing and I need motivation at the end of the time box. Like I have to put my phone away and I have to like know that at the end of whatever time I spend absolutely focused on something that like I will get a reward. I don’t know what that is. Like sometimes it’s chocolate. Sometimes it’s like walking around going outside.

But yeah, think like to be fair to myself, I think learning is by nature uncomfortable because you’re dipping your toe into something that you don’t know. And it’s so easy to pull back because that feeling of discomfort makes you want to leave. And I think that’s kind of a human thing. So yeah, I think.

Like the meta part of this is like recognizing that like it’s okay to feel uncomfortable and you know, give yourself some, give yourself some room and take breaks as you need to keep going.

Brittany (12:39) Yeah, one thing that I’ve noticed is I really like having a lot of different mediums to learn from. So like, I like having like a book and then a video and a course and all of these different ways. And I feel like having things explained to me multiple times through different mediums is very helpful. And I think one of the things that has helped me the most there in that space is accepting when I have gotten like the bulk of the information from something and then like saying goodbye to that resource without feeling like I have to

be a completionist and be like, no, I’m going to go through every single video in this course, or I’m going to read every single page of this book. I think I previously felt really guilty if I didn’t finish something all the way through, and now I’m like, you know what? I’m not getting as much out of this book, so I’m just going to put it down and move on to the next thing. And I think that’s been also really useful too.

Jon (13:27) And I think that…

Erika (13:27) It’ll still be there

if you come back to it.

Brittany (13:30) Yeah.

Jon (13:30) And I think it speaks to this idea, like, I think learning is like an iterative process where like, kind of, like, you know, we have this idea that you kind of learn something and then you move on. But like, you know, memories fade, you come back to material and with different experiences, different contexts, and you learn it in a different light. It can be applied to different set of problems. You can, yeah, just learn things deeper as time goes on. So I think that’s like, I think that’s really true. And I think that’s something that like has definitely…

know, just a phenomenon I’ve seen. mean, I’ve learned, there’s like five things that I’ve just learned, you know, I’ve come back to so many times and I’ve either forgotten about it or like had a deeper understanding of it.

Brittany (14:06) Yeah, I’m laughing because we just started a new book club within our book club and I realized I went to go buy the book and I realized not only did I already own it, but I’d already read over half of it in the past at some point and I have no recollection of it. apparently I did it. I highlighted it and everything, made notes. But yeah, it is an iterative process and something that I apparently need to repeat.

Erika (14:32) Yeah, or that feeling that you get when you read a page of information and at the end of it you have absolutely no idea what you just read.

Bethany (14:33) That is too funny.

Yeah, definitely. No, I had the same experience. Well, I haven’t read the book we’re doing for book club, but I definitely already owned it and I attempted to buy it again via Kindle and it was like, you already own this book. So that was fun. But I mean, to like.

loop in book club. think book club has been such a great way to learn things because you’re talking with other people, you’re discussing this thing. A lot of things that I wouldn’t have otherwise like retained or learned I feel like have stuck with me more just because we have that book club to look back on or look back on those conversations, which I think, Brittany, to your point, might also be the different mediums as well. Like you read something and then you discuss it out loud.

I also would say something that helps me is teaching other people. So trying to break out of the imposter syndrome of, I don’t know this, I have no authority to teach someone this, and actually just try to teach someone with what knowledge I have is super helpful. So I get a lot out of, like personally out of mentoring and just relaying things back to other people that I’ve learned recently.

think that’s technically called the Feynman Technique or something like that.

Jon (15:52) I was just about to mention the Feynman method. For things I wanna learn well, it’s like, start with a blank piece of paper and just explain it step by step to yourself. And I think I’ve told you this. I used to work at a coding, I was a teacher at a coding boot camp for like a year, or yeah, I think a year, maybe over a year. Anyways, but I got hired and we taught Rails, I didn’t know Rails. And…

I basically learned Rails by students asking me questions and me Googling the answers. And by the end of, I taught a three month class seven times. So just the same, and by the end of it, I definitely knew Rails pretty well and could answer all students’ questions. So yeah, teaching, mean teaching definitely, especially when you’re teaching the same thing over and over again, which most teachers do.

Erika (16:42) Yeah, I mean another thing that happens too when you like, and I think what we’re talking about is like talking with somebody discussing it, like teaching either like in video or like in person, something like that. I think the other thing that happens is like when you say it out loud, like A, your brain makes additional connections and like you’re thinking on like a deeper level.

And then also, you hear yourself say it out loud. So it cements it from an auditory perspective, too. Because there is that idea of different learning senses of tactile, auditory, visual. And I think a lot of times, I only go with the visual. Although when you do actually code something, you do get that tactile.

tactile memory too, but I mean I think even if you don’t have somebody to teach like you could like read your notes out loud or like teach yourself like you I do this sometimes when I’m like preparing for a presentation and I always hate it but it’s always super helpful of speaking my notes out loud or talking to myself in the mirror and yeah I think it’s a it’s a very powerful way to

add an extra channel in your brain for that information.

Jon (17:57) Yeah, I have a friend who he, know, there’s sometimes I’ll get like really excited about a topic and I want to explain stuff to him. And you know, it’s, it’s, um, this is just kind of his personality, but he’ll always find a question and ask me the question. I’ll be like, damn, I guess I don’t really understand this. And it’s, it’s, could be, you know, sometimes it’s kind of, you know, there’s a little, humbles you. Um, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s always nice to like, I think with students or just with other people, um, you can kind of.

convince yourself you understand something when, and I guess that’s just like the role of assessment in general, but I think having like shame or some social currency tied to you not understanding things like seems to stick with me more.

Brittany (18:37) If I learned anything while being a consultant, it’s that the answer to that is always, I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you. Works for basically every situation when you have those questions come up.

Jon (18:43) Yeah.

yeah, so.

Yeah, I guess we talked about sort of study techniques. You all want to talk about kind of resources we find useful. I think like one thing I’m very interested to hear is have you used LLMs at all to learn and how do you use them to learn? So yeah, I guess we can start with any like books or…

that have like really explained a topic well or online courses or YouTube channels, cetera, podcasts that just have provided like really good pedagogical value. I can start, I think one shout out is there’s a school called the Bradfield School, started by this guy named Oz Nova. And he used to teach in, I think it used to be in person, then it was online. And now he has this.

website, I believe it’s called csprimer.com and I don’t think it’s finished yet, but I think he does a really good job of explaining CS concepts to engineers and like, you know, a lot of it is like project focused, like you’ll build, I don’t know, like you’ll implement, you know, like the Redis protocol to learn more about databases or you’ll build a B-tree or something. So yeah, I think that’s like, if you’re interested in learning,

More about computer science fundamentals. I think that’s a pretty good resource.

Erika (19:59) I am a member of CS Primer and can definitely vouch for all the content being incredibly valuable and helpful from learning it through doing. Because I think as somebody who didn’t study computer science, a lot of the textbooks or learning materials approach it from a mathematical angle, which can be intimidating and

nonsensical if you don’t understand what all the math symbols mean. But approaching it from a coding perspective makes a lot more sense to me. Yeah, using logic principles and software principles. So agree that it’s a very practical and useful resource for learning those concepts and fundamentals.

And there’s a lot of content on there. Yeah, I think he is still working on it, but there’s a ton there to go through. So yeah, I think that’s a great call out.

Jon (20:55) Another

platform that I think just models how technology can be used to teach people is called Execute Program. There’s courses on TypeScript, SQL, I think Python.

It’s sort of like gamifies learning and you kind of do little challenges in the browser, like little programming challenges. it uses chunked learning and spaced repetition where you’ll cover a topic and then the next day you’ll be quizzed on it. And there’s this exponential back off of being reminded about something. And I just think more tools like that that use education research, like gamify learning.

teach things in chunks like should exist and are really useful and are fun to go through. So that’s like one that I think kind of models how I wish more tools or more educational tools were like.

Erika (21:44) Yeah, for sure. Going back to the motivation too. If something’s more fun, it’s probably going to be something you’re going to do more.

Brittany (21:51) Bye.

a resources that came to mind. think the first one is having a group that you can learn with, which is kind of a meta thing as well, because that’s essentially what we have formed here and have done for almost three years now. I was actually, you were mentioning the Ruby course and I was realizing that, or the Rails course, and I was realizing that my set of Rails notes is almost completely built on a backbone of notes that I made from John’s teaching me how to use Rails. So having a group of folks that

that are also interested in learning, that even if you’re not learning the same things, to try to teach each other back and forth is incredibly useful, I think. I also have this LLM prompt from a podcaster that I listened to. His name is Dan Coe. He shared it that he found on Twitter or X or whatever it’s called now. And it’s kind of useful. It’s a little bit…

I’ll share the prompt with you all. It’s about just like basically putting together a learning program, which I thought was really interesting. And I think one thing I like about it is that it pulls from multiple mediums, use like multiple YouTube videos and then a book and then whatever else. And I think that there’s a lot of value that can be gained from using LLMs to put together like a curriculum that’s like, personalized to things that work really well for you.

And then the last thing, the book, I feel like that I got the most out of within my career thus far. A lot of the things that I like to learn are not necessarily like the really technical things that go along with the career. But I like learning about like how to, you know, what do you need to do to get promoted? What sort of things do you, you know, how do you build visibility within your organization? How do you write for software engineers so that it’s something that they actually want to read? And one of the books that I think has been the best is the Software Engineers Guidebook, which was one of our,

It was one of our book club books in the past by George Lee Urose. It’s really good. Highly recommend it if you’re looking for like a book on software engineering and all of those extra things that are not just like the hard skills that come with it. It’s a really good one.

Bethany (23:45) I think you all definitely vocalized all of my thoughts. Basically, especially the social aspect, I think that’s what I miss most from college is just learning with other people. So I’m happy to have found something similar with you all. Yeah, I think I definitely learn a lot through reading. try to

read at least one technical book and one non-technical book at a time. lots of books I’ve learned from. And I love YouTube videos because I’m usually scrolling through YouTube anyways, so it’s kind of like, this isn’t like work. This isn’t tedious. So it tricks my brain into learning. Tech podcasts too are a lot of fun because I think you can do it while you’re doing other things.

It’s like passive learning. I will share one thing I haven’t done, so I don’t know how it works, but something I’m thinking about implementing next time I need to learn a concept or want to like really do a deep dive into something is Notebook LLM from Google. Apparently it’s really good about taking like a paper or a bunch of resources and

distilling it into learning materials. sometimes you can, think I’ve seen people make podcasts from this learning material or flashcards from it, or like reworded in a blog post or something. And I really love this part of LLMs and AI is that for so long, especially when I was beginning, I would read through things like I have zero idea what this is saying. I, I feel so dumb.

And so I love that there’s this opportunity to take things and really rephrase it and work with it to help you understand it in a way that is more natural to you, like having a personalized teacher with you to explain things. So genuinely looking forward to that aspect of LLMs.

Jon (25:36) Yeah.

Erika (25:37) Yeah, I will say I the flip side of that for me is like, like I think they’re super valuable for like rephrasing, reformatting information, like giving you, yeah, like almost like that discussion group, like the other way of thinking about things or like the different perspective that like unlocks it for you.

But I think the caution, I don’t think, I think I’m preaching to the choir here, but you hear about people using LLMs to cheat on tests or bypass certain learning steps. And it’s not going to do the learning for you. You have to still know what you’re trying to get out of it. And I think it’s most valuable when you’re aware of your own learning style and what you’re trying to get out of it.

So yeah, I mean, think that’s awesome. I’m definitely going to try out Notebook LLM too. I haven’t thought about it, thought about using it. But yeah, think the flip side of that is like, don’t expect it to learn everything for you. And also, it’s still not a personal teacher. It’s only as good as the sort of.

direction that you give it.

Bethany (26:44) Absolutely. think that’s a really good call out that you have to have a genuine desire to learn. I mean, I think after school, that’s kind of true in general. You probably won’t learn anything unless there’s that genuine curiosity. But yes, it’s no substitution for actually learning and digesting this information yourself. And I think really for me, the enticing part is I have always struggled with

like academic papers. Erica, I think you were mentioning this too. A lot of the math symbols and such are really complicated. And I even was in PhD for computer science for a year and I still struggle so much with them. So I am looking forward to having like ways to break those down in a way that.

makes more sense to me and maybe can explain like, what do these mean for somebody who’s not used to seeing these equations or might not have taken courses around that.

Jon (27:39) Yeah, and I think related to that is LLMs are good at helping you get unstuck. If you’re working through a problem and you… I’ve said to it, don’t tell me the answer, but this isn’t working, this code’s broken, or I need help.

with this next step of this derivation, can you help me? And I think LLMs are really good at, in my experience, kind of getting you unstuck.

But yeah, it is interesting. like, this kind of relates to like, do we need to, like what is knowledge? Like what’s the value of knowledge if like we have these LLMs? What can we just like delegate to tasking an LLM to do versus what should like we have a mental model of or have a working understanding of?

I think it’s different for obviously different topics.

Okay. Well, great. is, I mean, this is like, this conversation is perfectly timed for me.

Okay, so we’re gonna go around and talk about Book Rex, maybe give a little intro to the book. It can be a book you’ve read, maybe even a book you haven’t read, but I think it is cool,

Anyone want to give this a go?

Bethany (28:45) Is this tech books or any book?

Jon (28:49) I will say any book.

Bethany (28:50) Okay, then I would say currently I’m reading Pachinko, so I don’t know how it ends. No spoilers, but it is so good. Like, I don’t want it to end. It’s very, very good. So I think I’m just gonna wholeheartedly recommend that. My favorite fiction book is probably Piranesi.

I don’t think many people have heard about it and do not search anything about it going blind and it is such a cool book to kind of… it’s a vibe. You’ll see. For tech books, we recently read one with Book Club called Thinking and Systems and I’m hoping to do a recap on the pod soon, but it was so interesting. I feel like less technical…

than I was expecting, not really because it was less technical, but just because it applies to so many aspects of life and especially with situations we’re in now. It was fantastic. And if you are beginning in tech, one book that really changed my view on like more algorithms is Algorithms to Live By. I feel like it just really breaks down a lot of

things that people try to overcomplicate into stuff that you can really relate to in real life and such. And I recommend it to anyone who’s starting out, anyone who has any desire to understand algorithms who may not be in tech. It’s a great read.

Jon (30:09) Great. And I just want to say, think fiction books can help you in work because I think in fiction you’re sort of learning about people and a lot of work in the tech industry, just in general. And just life is dealing with people and interpersonal dynamics.

Erika (30:24) Sort of similar to what Brittany was talking about with the software engineer’s guidebook. I I find books really valuable that sort of help build mental models. I think they’re great as references, but super technical books where you’re learning about a specific concept, it’s…

I don’t know, like the exercises are more valuable than the book itself. So like I’ve gone through some books and they’re only as valuable as the exercises. So I don’t even think of them necessarily as a book. I think of it as like a workbook or something like that. But I think the one that’s sort of up next for me is one called How to Solve It. And it’s sort of specifically building that

problem solving muscle and yeah, kind of learning how to like crack any puzzle. So that’s yeah, that’s the one that I’m interested in picking up next. Let you know how it goes.

Brittany (31:20) I already mentioned the Software Engineers Guidebook, which I said was like a really great guide. think for anybody who’s getting into software engineering and just wants like a career guide, that’s a really good one. think one of the other ones that is really high on my list of like books that I feel like I think about a lot is The Chaos Machine. I think Erica, you’re the one who actually recommended it to me initially. But if you’re at all interested in algorithms, particularly social media algorithms, I think that that’s a book that

pretty much every software engineer should read at some point because a lot of the things we build are changing the world and it has a good way of showing how that world has changed. And the last book I’m reading right now and is incredibly good is called Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I know that’s like actually an older book because it was written in the seventies.

But I’ve been reading that pretty much every night for the last week or so. And it’s been kind of therapeutic in a way to like remember like, yes, we are on this earth that is spinning in space and like the universe is vast and there’s a lot going on out there outside of things that feel really, really big right here. So that’s been good. And also, I don’t know, it’s healthy, I think sometimes to remember the reality of the universe.

It’s also just been really good. It’s been really interesting.

Jon (32:34) Yeah, next. So I read a book called The Little Book of Aliens earlier this year, and it made me want to go… So it’s about like, it’s this astrophysicist talking about human search for aliens. And then it me want to go look at the stars. So in two weeks, Nikki and I are going to Joshua Tree when there’s a new moon. I believe that’s the name for it. Well, basically when the moon’s not in the sky. And then we found this guy with a telescope and we’re going to go look at…

stuff. So hopefully we’ll see stars and planets. But yeah, space really puts in perspective. But yeah, in my book, Rec, I’ll say is Designing Data Intensive Applications. that the title? Anyways, this book was like my first time really like, I read this, don’t know. Wow, maybe five years ago or some…

But I come back to it all the time. just, it was my first time like really interacting with distributed systems and like it’s practical and it does a great job of explaining kind of the different problems, like the main problem. And think having a good mental, especially working in distributed systems, having a good mental model of just like, this can happen, know, clocks can drift and.

know, machines could fail and consensus needs to be maintained and all this stuff is like pretty, pretty useful,

cool. Okay. Well, with that, I want to say thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe, and do whatever it is you like to do on the podcast app of your choice. Check us out on Blue Sky, our social media app of choice. Most of all, share with your friends. Until next week. Bye.