I’m adding this page to the mix because self-teaching is my secret weapon. My parents were kind enough to let me drop out of public school and design my own education, which 1,000% set ol’ Uncle Parker up to acquire any new skill on the fly.
My tactics for self-teaching have evolved over the last few years. I employ an arsenal of techniques, including note-taking while watching YouTube tutorials, reading written material (articles/books), passively inputting via podcasts/audiobooks, and just plain old jumping into a project and backtracking when I don’t understand something!
So here’s a quick rundown of what I’m currently self-teaching! The Academy of Parker is open for enrollment. Total students: 1. Class is in session.
Learning at least some of the basics of Electrical Engineering was an absolute prereq for working on the Spicy Meatbots robotics system. Like with all knowledge quests, I started out as a wee noob, and had to get clear on how robot electrical systems worked! This included understanding basic terminology (voltage, current, etc), getting down critical concepts (grounding, finding the right robot battery for a given current load, etc), and building up an intuition for how circuits worked. I read these noob-friendly SparkFun articles, asked some cringey questions on the Arduino forum, and most importantly, poured some college savings into iterating robot after robot after robot, each with a slightly tweaked electrical system, until I landed on a base system of components that could work for any Spicy Meatbot in the land.
This was an insanely fun process--so fun, in fact, that I switched my major from CompSci to Electrical Engineering because of it!
What am I working on now in the realm of EE? I’m learning how to read schematics and analyze circuits so I can start making some sick sensors like this one! (And also so that I can break it down for those following me in The Robot Underground curriculum.)
I really wanted to start getting my hands dirty with working on machine learning algorithms, but I quickly realized that I needed waaay more math-y tools in my toolbelt if I was going to build any seriously cool projects. Using this learning roadmap as my general guide, I decided to try my hand at learning some linear algebra. Here are some of the resources I’ve been using.
Needed to pivot in the middle of the first unit to Khan Academy because I definitely did not have the needed prerequisite knowledge.
Perfect for the basics, but I needed to get more of a bird’s eye view, you know what I’m saying? It’s almost like I needed the...essence of linear algebra.
Perfecto. I’m almost done with this incredibly enlightening video series. I recommend it to anyone who’s never taken a linear algebra class but wants to build up a sense of why it’s useful, and to get at the theory behind the computations.
Update 2/27/21, evening: I am happy to report that I just used this tutorial to build my first ever (very simple) neural net….and I could understand how it worked so much better because I steeped my mind in some piping hot linear algebra beforehand. It’ll be a bit before I understand everything going on in the code, but boy oh boy am I on a roll.
As we were building Nerdy Girls and The Robot Underground, we quickly realized that we were outgrowing our premade Wordpress templates. So I decided to try my hand at some HTML, CSS, JavaScript, gulp.js, and *shivers* PHP.
Here are the websites I’ve built so far with my new tools!
My first ever web dev project! I will be the first to say that we have a spaghetti-code situation going on here, and our load times are in the crapper, but I’ll go back in there this summer with my new knowledge and make things spick-and-span in no time!
My second major project. This one was more built around the infographics, so it’s simpler than NG’s site. It was a blast to work on!
Woah, meta. This site is my playground to mess around with new tools and to show off the cool stuff I get to work on.
Next up: more JS! Specifically, three.js so that I can put some spinning robot CAD models on these sites.