Introduction

I’ve been writing code for about 4 years now. In that time, I started like any CS student, with VSCode. If I wanted to write code, I’d type it like any other text. If I wanted to run my code, I’d hit a shortcut and VSCode would run it. I didn’t really understand how the code worked. I just knew it ran.

How Neovim and I met

A while ago, I started watching a YouTuber named ThePrimeagen. He was a Software Engineer at Netflix at the time, and every time I watched his streams on Twitch or YouTube, my eyes couldn’t keep up with what he was doing. Aside from his absurdly fast typing speed…

Why do we use Python? JavaScript? Java? Dart? Any first-year CS student can tell you these languages are slow compared to languages like C. If we want our software to run as fast as possible, why do we use these languages at all when we could just use C++ for everything?

The answer is simple: ease of use. These languages are very easy to use, their syntax is simple, they read almost like English, they’re usually portable, and, most importantly, they’re garbage collected.

Garbage collected means the coder doesn’t have to think about memory. They can (ironically) forget about it entirely. If I…

Math as a field has existed since the beginning of history. From the moment humanity started building civilization, numbers existed, but not all the numbers we know today existed. We started with the integers: $1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...$

These numbers were enough until we started running into problems calculating ratios. Around that time, fractional numbers, Fractions, came into existence to solve some of the problems we were facing.

Later we discovered that not every number can be written as a fraction, like $\sqrt{2}$ for example. This period was a bit rough, because some cultures considered whole numbers sacred, believing that…

One of the most beautiful concepts in mathematics in general, and in vector calculus in particular, is vector fields. Vector fields represent many things: gravity, electromagnetic fields, and neural networks.

Play around with the tool below. Try different numbers and see what results you get. You can choose from the presets if you need some inspiration.

Imagine you have a coin, and I tell you, “Give me this coin, and in a year I’ll give you $100\%$ of the value you put in.” That means in a year, you’ll get another coin.

So after a year, you’ll have $1 + 1$ coins. Now, if I told you I wouldn’t give you the full $100\%$ right away, but would give you $50\%$ after 6 months, and another $50\%$ after another 6 months, how much would you have after a year?

After 6 months, you’ll have

$1 \times 1.5 = 1.5$

And after the next 6 months, you’ll have

$1.5 \times 1.5 = 2.25$

Okay, what if I said 3 months? That means you’ll get $25\%$ every 3 months until a year is up. How much will you have?

After 3 months, you’ll have $1 \times 1.25$

After 6 months, you’ll…

Since most of the languages we use have some form of garbage collection, very few people actually think about memory in a practical way. Who cares when you call new Foo()?

You’re right. If you’re using a language like Java or Go, you probably don’t think about it much. However, if you’re using C++, it’s a different story. Any heap allocation you make with new must be freed with delete. It’s simple, right? When I’m done with something, I delete it!

Although the concept seems simple on the surface, humans are, by nature, fallible. Because of this, Microsoft says that 70% of the security bugs in…