Websites/Blogs I Like

(This is for myself more than for others, don’t expect a lot.)

• The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life - Radhika Nagpal. link
• DebianWiki - WhyDebian - had some punches (humourous as well as spiteful) that I can’t find now.

Ultimately, philosophy is the most durable differentiating criterion between the operating systems we are considering. Performance numbers change. Ease of use, reliability, availability of software – all these characteristics change over time, and you have to go out and re-evaluate them over time.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_the_Andaman_and_Nicobar_Islands: Netaji and friends were about to make India independent. Beginning with a proclamation at Port Blair.
• How To Criticize Computer Scientists - Douglas Comer’s blogs.

SysAdmin Stuff/CSE

• CodeCrafters (for systems newbies I guess): catalog of challenges, more like guided tours. (Thanks, Rishabh.)
• https://cycle.io/learn/ - more beginner-friendly than some would like, but it is good. A bit like Baeldung. (Thanks, Aman.)
• https://linux-training.be/ (Thanks, Aman.)
• How to cheat at benchmarking - The folks that set up fsbench.filesystems.org
• I’ve recommended Prof Matthew Jacob Thalutaveetil’s HPC course to quite a few people - it is an easy (and short) introduction to computer organisation and assembly programming, but not exactly HPC. Youtube NPTEL (Not an umbrella recommendation, this is here so that I tell people to find it themselves.)
• MS/Ph.D. interviews on Computer Systems: mildly amusing. (Biswa has written a number of blogs.)

Theory

(Shorthand for theoretical computer science, which I am totally not into.)
(Some, such as the second, aren’t far better than the OG texts, but I’m listing them because I avoid pirated and overpriced books these days. Recommendations are welcome.)

• Avi Wigderson’s extremely beginner-friendly book which gives a flavour of the mathematics in theory: link (Thanks, Farzan. Please make a website.)
• Boaz Barak, who co-authored the legendary Computational Complexity text, is now writing a free, online, open-source book on theoretical CS: Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science
• A one-time read - abstract algebra in the Journal of Inquiry-Based Learning in Mathematics. IBL is beautiful. link

Credits

• Friends
• Websites of other academics
• Doomscrolling
• Converted to HTML using pandoc