My name is Jonathan Yu. I’m a student at the University of Western Ontario, working toward two degrees concurrently: the first, a B.E.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and the second, a B.Sc. in Computer Science.
I write about my experiences in both of these fields. For me, writing is a good way to organize my thoughts and increase my understanding of what I learn. My interests are widely varied, though, and since I hope to be writing about my interests, my blog is unlikely to consistently appeal to any single target audience.
Instead, it is meant as a venue for sharing in new discoveries. Discoveries that are interdisciplinary. Discoveries that are numerous. Discoveries that will hopefully benefit somebody, somewhere, in the vast isolated connectedness that is our Internet.
In short, this Journal aims to be a distillation of the problems that I encounter in my life, both as an Electrical Engineering/Computer Science student, but also as a hobbyist programmer and aspiring electronics designer. I aim to write at an introductory level that focuses on conceptual understanding above technical details, because I believe that is what matters most.
One of the biggest problems I have encounted in my academic career is the pedagogy of “learning for the sake of learning” and “teaching for the sake of examining.” It seems that far too many instructors focus on in-depth understanding of every problem, so we end up leaving with our degrees with no real experience and simply the ability to perform rigorous mathematical analyses without wholly understanding the real-world implications of what we do.
I undertake to distill complex concepts for the “interested amateur.” It turns out that, on a conceptual level, most of what we learn isn’t really that complicated. And the conceptual level often ends up being many times more useful than mathematical formulas, calculations and algorithms. Many topics are pretty dry, but there is a silver lining to most of them, the significance of which is overlooked or completely forgotten by those teaching. I seek to highlight these for your viewing pleasure.
Thanks for reading my blog. Please do leave your comments, because this blog isn’t just for me, it’s for everybody.
Cheers!
