It’s January, that time of year when we all embark on wondrous plans for self-improvement. We join gyms, quit smoking and … start blogging again. And this year it’s going to stick, dang it!

But first, commit. I commit to writing something useful or interesting here at least once a week. I commit to coming here first with my ideas and musing, my code snags and bugs, my reviews and recommendations. I commit to blogging here (and then I can always tweet about it later!)

My next post will be on this intriguing research paper by Tina Gotschi on Mental Models of Recursion. I uncovered Gotschi’s paper while researching recursion in preparation for a proposal for RailsConf. Recursion is such a perfect concept, but one which I don’t feel I completely understand. I’ve had a few Eureka moments when using it in a program (like for the Zombie vaccine problem), but my grasp in imperfect. A dive deep enough to explain it to others should take care of that!

What’s your favorite computer science concept that you want to understand better? Or do you have a topic that took something out of the ordinary studying to understand? How did you tackle it?