Yes definitely

Interesting...would you be able to give an example of the state machines you built and how you used them?

Gliffy(www.gliffy.com) works great for me.

I have the same problem, this one for instance http://projecteuler.net/problem=267 I have absolutely no clue how to approach.

This just makes me feel inadequate...you wrote this in highschool? How old where you back then if I may ask and what made you take the challenge?

Also, how does one even start to write their own OS, I mean after you say "I'm going to write an OS form scratch", what's the first step, what's the first line of code and how do you figure out which components you need to implement and how? This is what really boggles me as a 30 year old crud guy, how do you design these sort of systems from scratch (OS's, emulators, compilers, etc)? It just makes me feel...completely useless compared to guys like you, you are so far ahead of the curve its not even funny, I could never reach your level.

Congratulations.

I've been thinking about a service like this. I think it would be very valuable for "experienced" devs (think 1 year repeated n times) or devs with a few years out of school who want to join a startup or a big co and are rusty in algo's, startup engineering, cs concepts and coding interviews. Stage 2 could even work as a sort of mini dev bootcamp, where candidates could work on not only interview techniques but also on developing a portfolio, sample projects, etc. Candidates could pay for mentorship once they select a mentor to work with.

onion2k's comment hit home - the last thing I want is to prey on anyone's desperation. I'm re-thinking the funding model and the question of who pays.

That was brilliant, there's also a cartoon: http://chrisdone.com/posts/monads-are-burritos

Absolutely, count me in!. Email in profile.

As a heads up (this is a common trap!), your email isn't actually in your profile at the moment.

The email field in your profile isn't public - so you need to put it into the about field as well for others to see it.

I learnt that one the hard way too.

got any tips/resources for an aspiring emulator programmer? I find emulation fascinating, I've always wanted to write an emulator for my favorite console (neo geo) but I'm mostly a CRUD programmer without a lot of comp architecture knowledge.

You'll need precise and complete documentation of the CPU and other hardware, which is not too hard to find nowdays (17 years ago it was mostly books and they were incomplete/wrong).

You can probably go a long way just by programming by the specifications with some literature on designing interpreters, but good assembly language skills on the emulated system will be extremely useful, because that's what you'll be looking at all the time while debugging.

Amazing guy, inspiring and at the same time, depressing...