[JHonaker]

I read a lot. I basically always have at least one fiction book and one technical book (usually math, statistics, or programming) that I'm reading at any given time.

I think I'm an outlier on the other end. This year I've read 3 or 4 books on programming language theory, one specifically about Scheme, and The Rust Book. I've picked up and read a a little bit to a lot from a lot of math textbooks.

This is all probably stems from graduate school training and my ADHD... It also helps to have PDFs or online versions and a baby that had some serious aversion to sleep, so the only thing you can do is sit in the dark rocking her and read...

[dev_0]

Do you take notes?

[JHonaker]

It depends. For books that have exercises, no. I just do the exercises. For books without exercises, yes. Usually I try some of the key proofs, or to write some code that uses it.

Usually with math/stats books I’m reading it for a specific purpose, so I start using it right away. For instance, I had to do some differential geometry and Lie algebras recently. I did problems in the book until I understood the material and then wrote some code that used it.

For the PL theory stuff, I mostly just tried to write a simple Scheme-like language interpreter that added worked with the thing or tried to use a new language that leveraged the ideas. When I was reading about compilers I basically just started adding compiler stages to a simple compiler. When I was reading about dependent types I played around with Coq, Agda, and Lean.