It’s moments like these that I realize I should have perused more math to find my true programming potential. :/ I’ll never be the good without it.
I'm personally never was good at math, so I want to see how it looks. That Christmas tree took me probably a week to build, and for someone it is likely a 10-20 minutes project.
Anyway, this curiosity motivates me to learn and build more. Hope it would work for you too!
This is an excellent point! There's no surer way not to motivate yourself to learn something than to think "maybe I'll use this one day" (or at least that's how it works for me); there's no surer path to lasting motivation to learn something than thinking that it'll be useful to address my current problem. (And then, once you get started learning it, often you'll find you get so excited that you go far beyond what you actually need–and that's fantastic!)
It's never too late! I think that this is a good time to roll out:
> “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
(which I first heard from rabidrat at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204797).
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=learning+math
The top links that come up all look interesting to me at first glance, but I am a mathematician by training rather than a programmer, so I can't say for sure.
I couldn't do anything "harder" than week two or three of Calculus 1 math without doing some reading, and even that would just be stuff I could solve by rote. And some of it I couldn't (I don't remember how to find limits, really). I've used stuff from linear algebra like once or twice ever (bitmap work on Android is the only one I can recall—camera shit, basically) and don't remember a single useful thing from that, really. Graphs? I think I've actually written code that directly worked with graph structures for one project, ever. Got a rough idea of what can and can't be done and know what to look up, which 100% suffices for stuff I do almost, but not quite, never.
Literally the only time I sweat this crap is when it's interview time. Otherwise, I recognize enough and have good enough google skills to find what I need. I'm still with-it enough that I could get actually-good at some of the math if I ever did find myself doing e.g. machine learning. Otherwise? Meh. I'll learn it when I need it. As far as I can tell outside a handful of positions that I am not gonna get hired for (too competitive and I don't got the pedigree for that, most of them require moving and I don't wanna), no one cares. Again, except in interviews when some companies decide you need to have a ton of stuff you have never used memorized.
[EDIT] to be clear, I don't mean to knock people who are more inclined to play with equations & proofs than I am, nor to shit-talk the work in question, which is neat.
Check out the demo https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated-orbits
Join the discord channel https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk
Their way of focusing on intuition as opposed to rote learning resonates well with me. And being properly motivated makes all the difference this time around.