These sources teach, or they describe how people improve. Many are careful explainers of a difficult topic. Others are about practice, attention and effort.
A Lean Syntax Primer
An opinionated beginner's tour of Lean syntax, building from definitions to proofs.
Linearizability! Refinement! Prophecy!
A long explainer on proving a queue linearizable with TLA+ refinement and prophecy.
The hitchhiker's guide to reading Lean 4 theorems
A short guide that teaches programmers to read Lean 4 theorems as typed code.
Tutorial: Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean (Part 1)
A code-along tutorial that proves the one-time pad correct in Lean 4.
Your type checker may be wrong - an introduction to formal proof verification and the Curry-Howard Correspondence
A blog explainer on Curry-Howard and why type checkers may reject correct code.
Introduction to Compilers and Language Design
The home page of a free compilers textbook, with chapter links and a print edition.
Two studies in compiler optimisations
A walkthrough of how LLVM optimises two small C++ functions, with source excerpts and exercises.
A beginner's guide to modern classical music
A personal blog guide grouping modern classical pieces by accessibility.
Music Theory for Programmers on Hacker News
A large discussion on whether music theory can be derived from first principles.
Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
A long Hacker News thread about a free online music theory textbook by Robert Hutchinson.
Music theory for programmers
A code-first walk from air pressure to scales, chords and tuning.
Bloom Filters
An interactive tutorial that explains how Bloom filters work and how to size them.
DuckDB Internals: Why is DuckDB Fast? (Part 1)
A vendor blog post explaining how DuckDB turns SQL into a plan and stores data.
Game design is simple, actually
A blog essay that sets out twelve steps for understanding game design.
Building an Advanced Agentic Harness
A tutorial that upgrades a basic agent loop into a planned, parallel, checked system.
Context engineering
An explainer that treats everything fed to an LLM as an engineering design problem.
Bluesky post recommending the MORPHO anatomy reference books
A short Bluesky post recommending MORPHO books for learning proportions and anatomy.
Strange Attractors
An introduction to chaos through a particle visualization in the browser.
Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents
A short blog post of lessons from building retrieval-augmented generation for two projects.
Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
A plain-language newsletter article on how reinforcement learning helped make agentic AI models possible.
You could have invented transformers from memory
A blog post that derives MLP and attention layers by improving a simple key-value memory.
muon optimizer explained to a toddler
A short newsletter post that summarizes how the Muon optimizer works in plain notes.
How Gödel’s Proof Works
A magazine explainer walking through the main steps of Gödel's incompleteness proof.
Mathematical Patterns in African American Hairstyles
A short paper on tessellation patterns in African American hair braiding, with teaching ideas.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
An essay arguing that sustained attention makes experiences feed back on themselves and deepen.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
An essay on the solitary mental state where new ideas arise.
Ideonomy: A Science of Ideas
An introduction to ideonomy, a proposed science of ideas formulated by Patrick Gunkel.
Maybe you're not Actually Trying
An essay arguing that capable people often under-try in one area.
Troubleshooting: a skill that never goes obsolete
An essay of practical tips on troubleshooting, treated as a skill that applies across fields.
Developing Taste
A short essay on taste as a trained instinct and how to build it.
Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
A Hacker News thread debating a post that advises retyping LLM-generated code by hand.
The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
A Hacker News thread on whether AI agents let students skip the learning that matters.
A Friendly Tour of Process Memory on Linux
A guided tour of how Linux gives a program memory.
Exploring Mach-O, Part 1
Part one of a series that builds a tiny ARM64 program and reads its header.
The Nitty Gritty of “Hello World” on macOS
A walkthrough of the Mach-O file format using a compiled Hello World program.