Category Theory

Published: October 20, 2020

At the start of this year, pre-pandemic, I spent a fair bit of time learning about Category Theory. Now that the month of March is almost over and some time has passed, I have to say it's had a rather profound effect on my overall thinking about software. Can I explain why? No. Am I at a level where I could even coherently describe it to a programmer on the street? Nope. Nor am I going to try to do that here.

However, there are a number of resources I've used in my journey so far. I merely thought I'd document them here so I could find them again. These are listed in the same order that I've studied them:

18.S097: Applied Category Theory (2019)
18.S097: Programming with Categories (2020)
Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski.
Category Theory 1 Videos (Bartosz Milewski).
Category Theory 2 Videos (Bartosz Milewski).
Category Theory 3 Videos (Bartosz Milewski).

Category Theory has not been an "easy" topic for me to wrap my brain around--and that's despite the fact that I majored in math as an undergraduate. At the moment, I feel like I have reasonable grasp of the big picture concepts, but I don't yet have fluid ability to actually do anything real with it. So, in that respect it's about the same as my current ability to play guitar after two years of lessons. I'll keep working on both.

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