2021 EOY Blog

The year of the learning adventure.

The adventure of reading TCP Illustrated

I started reading TCP Illustrated out of curiosity. I got to page 100 and thought, “this is pretty good.” Then I got to page 200 and thought, “wow, I can’t believe that I made it to page 200.” Then, I had to decide to read the whole book or not. The book is 922 pages. It was a challenge, and I had to pace myself to read 40-50 pages a week, but I did it. The benefits from reading this book weren’t really planned, but I started seeing them right away.

The adventure of learning TLA+

I somehow stumbled upon TLA+ through watching a series of YouTube videos. I first watched Trust but Isolate The future of software which talked about the language Isabelle for formal methods. I did some research and saw a few languages mentioned and some pros/cons of different languages, one of which was TLA+, so I decided to next check this language.

I then watched the video SREcon20 Americas - Weeks of Debugging Can Save You Hours of TLA+ which in my mind connected programming to a specification language for formal methods and was the perfect next step to learning TLA+.

From here, I researched TLA+ and found the website and watched the TLA+ intro videos. I watched all videos, and am now checking out the Examples and TLA+ Specifying Systems book.

Some other highlights

Tried out Github Actions. They work nicely with AWS OIDC auth.

Coded with my son and daughter for the first time. This was quite funny. My daughter was giggling because she was having so much fun. My son hung in there for a while, but then got bored and said, “this is boring. How do you turn this off.”

What’s next for 2022

I am continuing to learn TLA+. I’m currently reading the TLA+ Specifying Systems book. I also started reading Distributed Algorithms by Nancy Lynch again. This has new meaning after watching the TLA+ videos. I plan to read both at the same time.

I still want to learn Golang, but I don’t want to pivot just yet.