What to Read, Watch, and Listen To¶
Why I'm asking you to do this
Spend 10 minutes a day staying curious about computing. Scan one source. When something catches your attention, follow the link.
You aren't expected to understand everything. After four years, the vocabulary and ideas that seem foreign today will be familiar.
Not a reading list to finish, and not something I'll quiz you on. A habit, started small, in your first semester rather than your last. Everything here is free. A few sources have paid tiers; you never need them.
Start with one source. Not five.¶
TLDR is the easiest beginning: a free five-minute email on weekday mornings. Add a second in October if the first one stuck. Subscribing to eleven newsletters in week one is how people end up reading zero and feeling guilty about it.
Computing is also not all artificial intelligence, and a reading diet that is all AI will give you a distorted picture of the field you're entering. This is a menu, not a checklist.
| Corner of CS | Source | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Everything, daily | TLDR | A free five-minute email each weekday. The one I'd pick if you only ever pick one |
| The industry you're joining | The Pragmatic Engineer | Gergely Orosz on how software companies really work: hiring, internships, pay, what engineers do all day. Unusually honest, and useful for your Four-Year Plan |
| AI | Simon Willison's blog | The clearest writing anywhere on what LLMs can and can't actually do, from someone who builds with them daily. Skeptical without being dismissive |
| Chips and hardware | SemiAnalysis | Dylan Patel on semiconductors and data centers: the physical machinery underneath everything else. Harder than the rest, and worth growing into |
| Security | Krebs on Security | Brian Krebs on breaches, fraud, and cybercrime. Reads like true crime, and it's where half our cybersecurity session comes from |
| When you want the full story | Ars Technica | Real technical journalism that respects the reader, for when TLDR's three sentences aren't enough |
| The beautiful, abstract part | Quanta | Gorgeous writing on math and theoretical computer science. Where you go to find out that theory is fascinating after all |
| What the field is arguing about | Hacker News | Nothing to do with breaking into systems: "hacker" here is the old meaning, a clever programmer. The comments are the real value, often including the person who built the thing. Show HN is people posting what they built, usually small and unfinished, which is Ship-It happening in public every day |
One bookmark, not a subscription: Julia Evans and her Wizard Zines explain the command line, git, DNS, and debugging better than anyone. Go there the week you're stuck on git.
What people are building: GitHub Trending is what's getting starred right now. It's a popularity chart, not a quality ranking, and trending repos make bad first pull requests: huge, busy, and maintained by people drowning in notifications. The ReadME Project is GitHub's writing about the people behind open source, and direct background for the open-source session.
Medium is a platform, not a source. Quality runs from excellent engineers writing for free to AI-generated filler. Follow specific writers, never Medium itself, and check who wrote something before you trust it.
Thinking about starting something? YC Startup School is free and written for the merely curious, and Paul Graham's essays are the most influential writing on startups there is. Every company they describe began as somebody building a small thing that mostly didn't work, which is Ship-It at first-year scale. What's available on this campus is in Opportunities.
Watch and listen¶
For the walk across campus, the gym, or the drive home.
| Source | What it is |
|---|---|
| Darknet Diaries | True stories of hacking and breaches, told as narrative. The most addictive thing on this page. Start anywhere |
| Acquired | Three-hour company histories. The Nvidia and TSMC episodes explain why AI happened better than most AI coverage does |
| The Changelog | Weekly conversations with the people who build and maintain open source. A good sense of who actually makes the software everyone depends on, and direct preparation for the open-source session |
| Lex Fridman Podcast | Long-form interviews, often three hours, with the researchers and founders building this field. Don't start at episode one: pick a guest whose name you recognize and skip around |
| Fireship | Fast, funny, a little unhinged. The best way to find out a technology exists. Start here if the others feel like homework |
| Computerphile | Ten-minute explanations of core CS ideas by the people who teach them. The closest thing to this course in video form |
| 3Blue1Brown | Grant Sanderson's animated math. His neural network series is the best introduction to how they work, full stop |
| Ben Eater | Builds a working computer from individual chips on breadboards. Watch one before the operating systems session and it lands differently |
Your ninety seconds¶
Once during the semester you'll open class with one slide and ninety seconds about something that happened in computing recently. Three students go each week, from Wed, Sep 16 through Wed, Nov 18, and you get your date in the Git session. No paper, no rubric, not graded on polish. It counts as participation. The slot is the deadline; the habit is the point.
What works: a launch, a breach, a paper that surprised people, a lawsuit or a new regulation, an outage with a good postmortem, a shutdown of something people relied on.
What to say, in this order: what happened (one sentence, skip the background) · why it matters (one or two sentences, the part people remember) · what surprised you (one sentence, the part that makes it yours).
Rules of thumb:
- From the last couple of weeks. It's called This Week in CS.
- One story, not three. Ninety seconds is shorter than it sounds. Say it out loud once beforehand and you'll find out.
- Pick something you actually found interesting. An honest "I thought this was wild" beats a dutiful summary of something that sounds important.
- Verify it's real. Find the primary source: the actual paper, the actual company post, the actual court filing. Headlines overstate, and confidently written articles about research that doesn't exist are now common enough that you'll eventually hit one.
You may use AI freely to find and summarize your story, 🟢 Green under the AI Policy. The verification step is not optional, and it is the entire skill.
Keep it going¶
There's a #this-week-in-cs channel in our Slack. Drop in anything interesting you find, any week, whether or not it's your turn: one link and one sentence about why you clicked it. Not graded, and never will be. The habit is the point, and habits are easier with company.