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Tracks I've done and suggested to friends and colleagues as learning experiences: * Compression (lossless, lossy, image, audio, texture, video) * Languages (bytecode interpreter, AST interpreter, parser/lexer for a simple language, simple JIT, understanding instruction scheduling) * DSP programming (writing programs for fast, branchless math) * Comfort with binary and binary formats (start with packfiles .zip/.tar, move onto reverse engineering simple formats for e.g. games) * Understanding the difference between RAM and address spaces (e.g. understanding virtual memory, mmap, memory-mapped IO, dynamic linking, the VDSO, page faulting, shared memory) * Device drivers (easier on Linux, understanding userspace/kernel interaction, ioctls, how hardware and registers work, how to read spec sheets and hardware manuals) * Graphics (modern software rasterizer that's not scanline-based, understanding 3D and projective transforms, GPU programming and shaders, basic lighting (reflection and illumination) models, what "GPU memory" is, what scanout is, how full scenes are accumulated all along the stack) I could go heavily into depth for any one of these. Ask me questions if you're interested! They're all fun and I always have more to learn. Also, the longer you get into any given track, the more you realize they all connect in the end. |