I just want to thank 3b1b, and tell anyone who's trying to get in love with math to go ahead and binge his channel.

I've been terrible at math since they started to get "hard" as a teenager, which then compounded into not liking math before and after getting into college for a CS degree.

The degree inevitably requires some math background at the beginning, so I struggled with that a lot, until I discovered 3b1b.

His series on calculus and linear algebra got me through both subjects in less than a week. From 0 to 7 in the scale of 0 to 10 we use in my university, in just 3-4 days per subject. I regret not discovering it before.

What those two series helped me with was understanding why math is important, and how can one solve everyday problems with math, which is something teachers say when you are young but don't actually tell.

Realising that instantaneously motivated me to put in time and effort, which is key when learning math.

The machine learning series also helped me find the answer to the "why am I learning math if I'm just a tech?" question.

On the side, I'm now reading "Computer Networking: a Top-Down Approach" by Kurose, which made me get to the conclusion that we are teaching things wrong. The educational system that brought me here teaches you on a promise of everything making sense once you understand it all, which makes it really hard to understand the pieces in the first place.

The book takes a different approach in that it shows you the final result, and then breaks it down abstraction by abstraction, which makes you eager to know what's going on behind the next abstraction.

If I were to teach a kid how a mechanical watch works, I wouldn't start by the gears, I'd start by the watch itself, and then break it down piece by piece. Once he knows that there's this abstract system that takes some force in one end, and spits some other force in the other, then the kid will want to know what's behind the abstract system, and he'll be ready to know it.

This way I'll keep the attention of the kid till the end, instead of telling him "you'll understand once we finish" after each lesson.