September 2020 summary

It feels almost like yesterday. It’s the 1st of September and I’ve started my journey towards low-level stuff of computer science. Thirty days – that was the plan. Now it is behind me, so a time came to sum everything up. Let’s go.

To start with – I’ve begun with a huge mistake. Trying to kill too many birds with one stone. To be completely honest – that was not a plan at the beginning. However, after a couple of days of reading Tannenbaum’s book I’ve understood, that there is no way I could make that regular context switch (OS concepts/Linux/C programming) and make it work. The amount of knowledge consumed every day (and writing notes alongside) was pretty large. Trying to simultaneously dive into C programming was a nice distraction at the beginning, but then as I’ve mentioned – it felt like a constant struggle to ‘reposition the mind’. Eventually after finishing writing a post about characters’ encoding I’ve settled with reading second chapter of Tannenbaum’s book. And two days ago I’ve finally finished.

Wow, that was something! I mean – the knowledge there is about processes, and their communication is – let’s just say it – humongous. The details that OS-designers must take under consideration are so low-level, that we are talking CPU registers. However, let’s be honest – that is what OS is made for – manage processes. It was really a great journey, and a lot of fun (with a teeny-tiny spice of hard work). The mastery concept is still giving me chills, and I’m sure that I was right starting this whole project. I want to continue. I would love to continue. It’s only in my power to make that happen.

So what’s coming next on my path to mastery? I think that for the time being it will be best to keep things simple. I am gonna still be using my current writing system – that is a mixture of simple Markdown files and storing them on GitHub (private repository for data safety). When the time comes – I assume it will be easily ported to whatever presentation system I choose (if You’re reading it – it means that I’ve succeeded).

As for the current learning agenda – I am thinking about giving C programming a shot this time. While reading Tannenbaum’s book I was able to understand the code, the pointers itself are a concept that I cannot say I am that familiar with. Also, my post about encoding is just an introduction to this theme, and I want to write another post describing specifics of character/string handling by C. Therefore, my plan for upcoming month will be to go back to the basics – let’s learn some C! To the book I’ve been using at start (C in a nutshell), I’ve bought one more (yeah, I’m a bookworm, what I can say) – Stephen Prata – C Primer Plus.

Below I present the complete list of my activities during September. I’ve mentioned it before – they say that it takes 30 days to establish a habit. I’m not sure if that already occurred, but I plan to continue my every day activities. Stay tuned – next monthly summary in the beginning of November.

• 01.09.2020 – first drafts for the blog articles, structure, how to proceed, etc.
• 02.09.2020 – continued the above.
• 02.09.2020 – Peter Prinz, Tony Crawford – First chapter of C in a nutshell
• 03.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – part of first chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes
• 04.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – finished first chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
  Additional read on Wikipedia concerning different kernel architectures.
• 05.09.2020 – Types in C language and additional read about storing floating numbers in memory, processors architectures and history. Also asked question on SO.
• 06.09.2020 – Free day (Sunday)

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• 07.09.2020 – Started writing a post about encoding
• 08.09.2020 – Chapter 3 (data types) of C Primer by Stephen Prata
• 09.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes
• 10.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes. Also asked – a question on SO
• 11.09.2020 – Continued writing a post about encoding
• 12.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 13.09.2020 – Free day (Sunday)

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• 14.09.2020 – Finished post about encoding.
• 15.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 16.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 17.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 18.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 19.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 20.09.2020 – Free day (Sunday)

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• 21.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 22.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes and additional read on the internet.
• 23.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 24.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 25.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 26.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 27.09.2020 – Free day (Sunday)

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• 28.09.2020 – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – next part of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems with notes.
• 29.09.2020 – Finished writing notes of second chapter of the book Modern Operating Systems. All the notes from this month can be found on my GitHub repo.
• 30.09.2020 – Refreshed a post about encoding.