I'm tempted to open up this diary again rather than my LiveJournal one, partially because LJ is so slow, and because I don't always feel comfortable talking about programming topics there, since I know no one really cares. It's probably also because I've been reading Advogato a lot more (since k5's "technology" articles have gone waaay downhill), and because I want to get more involved in the free software community.

I think the latter point stems from what I'm learning at UMN at the moment. I'm not actually learning any new programming theory per se (I did learn Scheme, but second semester is Java and I honestly did everything we're learning in there before I hit puberty), but I'm learning how to formalize my programs and thought structures about programs, and also more about discrete mathematics, a subject which I "knew" from programming before, but didn't have the jargon to express. I'm finding myself reading CS research papers and understanding them, and managing to teach myself using them, in addition to tutorials and existing code, which is how I taught myself before. Honestly, this feeling is exhilirating, akin to how good I felt when I wrote my first program, or the first few months after I switched over to UNIX.