hey,
this week was a lot more hands on and a lot less abstract.
the main focus was the swift student challenge. i came up with a solid idea, planned it out carefully, and then built the whole thing end to end. everything’s done now, so i’m just waiting until the 5th when submissions open. it feels good to fully close the loop on something like this instead of dragging it out over weeks.
alongside that, i spent some time learning the maths behind markov chains. instead of stopping at theory, i implemented a simple text predictor trained on jane eyre, written from scratch in python. it was a fun way to connect probability and code, and it made the ideas stick way more than just reading about them. i’ve put it into its own repo so it’s all documented and reproducible.
that project also fed into something bigger i’m working on: stem-sims. the idea is to turn it into a proper collection of stem-related simulations, things like coin tosses, random walks, page rank, and text prediction, all in one place. i’m trying to make it easy for other people to contribute, with the long-term goal of building a reusable, educational bank of sims across different topics.
i also tried doing a bit of cad this week. honestly, it’s hard. it hasn’t clicked yet, and progress feels slower than with software. i’m not giving up on it, but i’m still figuring out how much time it deserves compared to everything else.
looking ahead, i’m going back to learning c next week. i want to properly understand dynamic memory, allocation, and how things work at a lower level, especially now that i’ve been thinking more about fundamentals.
this week felt like a good balance of shipping, learning, and setting things up to compound later. not flashy, but solid.
thanks for following along,
vulcan