What this blog is about

Over the last couple of years, I have spent a considerable part of my spare time digging deeper into some topics around computer science and mathematics, mostly driven by the desire to understand how all that really works. Many years ago, I wrote a multi-threaded Unix kernel and made it boot on my PC to understand how multitasking works. Some years later, I built a small 4-bit CPU out of standard TTL circuits to because I wanted to understand the inner workings of a CPU. And recently, I learned Python to collect hands-on experience with neural networks and explore their relation to statistical physics.

If I had tried to learn all this twenty years ago, I would have needed access to a world-class library, and even than I would have spent an incredible amount of time scanning textbooks and papers to dig out the few really valuable nuggets of information that eventually make you understand.

Fortunately, we now live in a world where an incredible amount of information at our disposal.  I was always very grateful to find so many freely available resources on the web – source code, tutorials, blog posts and papers, created not for the sake of profit but simply to share ideas and thoughts, and maybe hoping that it might be of use for someone out there. Now I decided to do the same thing – giving back a bit of what I have seen, in the hope that it might be helpful for whoever is trying to learn and understand.

My interests vary quite a bit, and so will the topics of this blog. I will probably start with a few posts on the stuff that I recently looked at, namely some topics around machine learning and artificial intelligence, and the technology behind the blockchain. I will try to make this as tangible as possible, so I will also show you how to actually code these things. At the moment, the programming language of choice that I use for that is Python, so you should not be surprised to find a few Python code snippets in my posts.

So let us start – in my first post, I will explain the basics of keys and addresses in the blockchain.