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On Richard Feynman and the "Build in Public" movement

Why this blog exists

This morning I was talking to my roommate about Lagrange multipliers. I’ve encountered them in classes various times, most recently in a machine learning class I am taking. Every time they were explained I would nod along and understand the gist and how to apply them to the specific application. This question was more general and in explaining it to him, I clarified a few key points of my own understanding. This is basically the idea behind the Feynman technique. The eponymous technique was pioneered to Dr. Richard Feynman a Nobel laureate who studied physics and taught at Caltech. The idea is composed of 4 main parts:

  1. Pick a topic
  2. Teach it
  3. Fill gaps
  4. Simplify

Step one is pretty self-explanatory. When talking about the Feynman technique people also conflate it with a quote generally attributed to another Physics Nobel Laureate in Dr. Albert Einstein

“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

This echoes the sentiment of step 4 in the Feynman Technique. Explain it simply without shuffling details off to loaded technical jargon, and you are forced to reconcile all the details in your head. All the context is being given rather than leaving some burden on the interpreter to understand what “semantic segmentation” or “synaptic pruning” or a “Buckminsterfullerene nanostructure” is.

I honestly think that when you go to teach it you will have to fill the gaps. If you do it in any sort of interactive setting, you will be asked questions and those will get you to think about things more deeply. Even beyond that, articulating your thoughts is a pretty good way to solidify them and clarify them even to yourself.

I’ve also been seeing this idea about “building in public” on Twitter. The idea is for founders/developers/engineers to be more open about the reality of building new things and to share the lessons they learn along the way. It’s also about sharing ideas and taking in feedback to improve whatever they are making.

In days bygone, I used to stream game development on Twitch. The idea was that I could get feedback and assistance from people in chat and learn while building. Admittedly, there were other reasons and anyone who has been on Twitch knows it has issues with discovery, but none of my first dozen or so streams, another game developer dropped into my chat and showed me an easy way to do something I had been spinning up my own solution to.

All that to say. I plan to be more active here. The reason this blog exists is a combination of those two ideas and others, combined with some inspiration from the MIT Admissions blog and various other blogs.

I plan to explain things I’m learning, hopefully in a way that is clear to others, improving my own understanding along the way. I also want to show the things I am building and have built, hopefully in a way that makes them better or inspires other people’s approaches.

So Hi. I’m Sidney, a wannabe polymath and autodidact and this is my little corner of the internet.