My name is Winston Ridgeway Hardy. People call me Winston, Ridgeway or Ridge. Thankfully these are mostly what I hear and respond to. I have lost a huge amount of time to mental illness in my life, having been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Only very recently have I regained the level of focus that I once had in my youth and I pray that this focus remains with me. I am currently somewhat rusty in my programming skills. I wish now to become proficient in javascript and python.

I intend to use this hashnode site to document my journey of diving back into programming and I intend that it will be a rather deep dive. I have programmed in the past (mostly in C++) but my focus has now changed and I would like to learn Artificial Intelligence, and I believe that I will enjoy learning some javascript and python along with learning about PyTorch and TensorFlow (core libraries/platforms). My interests are diverse but primarily l am focused on general artificial intelligence, data visualization, and several branches of mathematics with a strong interest in group theory, category theory, number theory and cryptography. In time I also wish to learn Haskell and all the while I will document my learning experience here on hashnode.

I realize that the hardest part of any learning journey is the beginning when you know the least. In my case, I do have a wealth of prior knowledge to draw upon if I can only remember it. It is yet to be seen how much my prior experience will help me, but in documenting my journey I wish to make all of my exposition clear enough that even a relative beginner in programming could easily follow my steps.

Here is some interesting, tangential but still pertinent reading: https://csis.pace.edu/~grossman/dcs/XR4-PromiscuousPairing.pdf

It has been my experience that the best way to learn is to apply yourself to real-world problems. Here are some problems that also have a cash prize:https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems