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# Educational Motivation

### Week of May 03 - May 09

Most of this week was spent researching things and listening to podcasts related to education and academic-adjacent topics. I am not going to recap too much since most of it was practical knowledge and I am not looking to explain it just yet. It would be cool to start making videos where I explain concepts I’ve learned and how I applied them to projects I am working on. But this will be a project for another day.

## Nginx: Beginner’s Guide

Docs by Nginx

Currently working on a project at work in which I am hosting Bookstack, an open source wiki software1. In order to bring that self-hosted instance of Bookstack online, I want to install a reverse proxy, and since I have not done that before, I am reading through their docs now. In theory, I know what a reverse proxy is and what it does, but I have never had to implement or set one up, so this is going to be a cool little learning opportunity.

## Go by Example: Command-Line Flags

Post by Mark McGranaghan and Eli Bendersky

This was part of my research on a personal project I am doing. I’ve written CLI programs in Go before, but usually I have needed a bit more control of the arguments, flags, and commands, so I end up using an external library. Usually I use Viper2 and Cobra3. But on this project, a Neovim plugin using a Go RPC server, I am only needing very simple and controlled use of flags, so I opted for the built-in library flag.

## THIS is Android 17

YouTube video by 9to5Google

Long ago, when I was very into jailbreaking my iPhone and installing developer betas, I used to be super into all the new features and into the channels covering what to expect for the next release of iOS. This interest has dropped a lot since then, but now that I switched to Android, the itch to customize and see what is coming soon is starting to come back.

From the sound of it, this might not be a crazy overhaul, not like the update from 15 -> 16 on Material 3 Expressive4, but still interesting. From this video, the things that were the most interesting to me were:

  • the multitasking floating apps
  • per-app dark mode controls
  • the possibility of having more blurred surfaces (really hope this is not like liquid gl(ass)5)
  • native app blocking

## Why does Cambridge teach OCaml as the first programming language?

YouTube video by Frank Stajano Explains

I love hearing about different colleges and their takes on why they teach what they do and the way they do it. I did not learn about functional programming languages until my last year of university, and I remember having quite a hard time with the entire paradigm of functional programming. To hear that this is the first language introduced at Cambridge was very shocking.

The main arguments as to why they use OCaml as the first language were:

  1. functional programming gives a solid mathematical foundation 2. using functional languages helps with proving programs are correct (ok, formal verification6) 3. good challenge for already high-achieving scholars while still being beginner friendly (it is almost everyone’s first time using OCaml, so a good equalizer)

All of these are good points, and thinking deeper about it, I was probably just having a hard time with the functional paradigm because of my bad habits of using non-functional languages. Starting out with a functional language might not be so bad after all, especially for a theoretical degree. I do keep forgetting that the Computer Science degree is a very theory-heavy degree. Its roots start with research, not as a pathway to software engineering, which I once erroneously thought it was. Thinking of the CS degree this way makes so much more sense to teach a functional language (and probably C, since it is the ultimate “high-level” language that expresses how a computer works in the most human-friendly way.)

There is also a section about him answering the question of whether being good at mathematics is required to be a good computer scientist/programmer. This was interesting, but not why I clicked on the video :P. It was honestly purely because of OCaml. That does not mean it was not a good section though, it was interesting and worth a listen to hear about the similarities between mathematicians and computer scientists.

## Grant Sanderson (@3Blue1Brown): The High Cost of Being a Second-Hand Thinker

YouTube video by Life of Luba

“I actually know the solution for education … it is neither scalable nor ethical” - 3Blue1Brown

This was the highlight of the podcast. Grant Sanderson brought up a humorous, non real solution to the problem of education. This was during a section in the video where they were talking about how he sees education evolving with LLMs. Grant brings up the argument that, in education, there is not a problem of lack of explanation; it is a problem of motivation. His proposed solution was to hire actors who are the same age as the students you are teaching, assign a mark to each actor, and have them get close/flirt with each other, ultimately motivating each other into learning about the topic at hand. The thought process behind that is that there is not a single stronger motivation than social peer motivation. While a silly example, there is a lot of truth there, and hopefully I am able to be that person in the community that motivates the people around me to want to learn more.

Somewhat not related to the actual content of the video, but I remember being in high school and watching his videos, and every time I finished them I would get this delusional thought that I wanted to get a math PhD and just study/teach the intricacies in numbers and the world around us. Right before university, Math was a very strong contender for my major, but ironically I ultimately ended up going into Comp Sci for the job security 🤡.

All throughout the interview I got that same feeling that I used to when I watched his “essence of” videos7 8. The only difference is that now I got that feeling with education. I felt so inspired, and it made me want to keep learning as much as possible. I have been deviating so much from the path of engaging in what I am curious about, and instead I am just learning things to better prepare for the job market :(. I think this has been very detrimental to my motivation and, in turn, my learning. Hearing them talk about what success means to them, the difference between being a source vs a relay, and the story about his recent speech at a wedding makes me feel very inspired. This is the type of content that heals my AI trauma.

  1. https://bookstackapp.com ↩︎

  2. https://github.com/spf13/viper ↩︎

  3. https://github.com/spf13/cobra ↩︎

  4. https://9to5google.com/2025/05/13/android-16-material-3-expressive-redesign/ ↩︎

  5. https://www.phonearena.com/news/liquid-glass-was-so-bad-that-apple-will-give-you-another-way-to-tone-it-down_id178795 ↩︎

  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification ↩︎

  7. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDMsr9K-rj53DwVRMYO3t5Yr ↩︎

  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk_zzaMoSs&list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab ↩︎