1. When I grew up in Taiwan, I was an avid reader of a certain PC gaming magazine. In addition to the usual strategies and walk-throughs, every issue also cont

1. When I grew up in Taiwan, I was an avid reader of a certain PC gaming magazine. In addition to the usual strategies and walk-throughs, every issue also contained hex editing guides for various popular games. I could follow the instructions well enough, but I didn't understand hexadecimal numbers, so it was just monkey-see-monkey-do. Then one day, while flipping through computer books at an underground store, I "got" hex numbers, and my mind was blown. A whole new game hacking vista opened up in my mind's eye. 2. While learning Clojure, I tried my hand at implementing the Lisp interpreter described in PG's "The Roots of Lisp" paper. There were many "aha!" moments along the way, but the biggest one came when I understood how I could define the "eval" function inside my interpreter, which allowed me to run a Lisp interpreter inside my Lisp interpreter (which was running in Clojure, which was running on the JVM, etc.).