The hacker’s way of learning
If you want to learn programming (or anything, really), you have two options.
The first one is to start learning from the ground-up. This is the approach most schools, academies, and online courses take. They introduce you to the basic concepts first — variables, data types, objects and procedures. Then, more advanced topics come, such as classes, OOP, events, streams, functional programming, working with files, databases, HTTP, etc. Lastly, after days or weeks of studying the theory, you build something cool and useful that, hopefully, you’re not ashamed to show your mom.
There’s a second way to learn, though. One, that is way more interesting and challenging.
Taking the second approach, your start by having an idea, followed by a simple question.
“I want to build a blockchain app. How do I do it?”
This is the beginning of your journey from the surface to the depths of the knowledge. The “How to do it” question starts a domino-effect of follow up questions, that show you what exactly you don’t know and need to learn.
“What is blockchain? What language is a blockchain built with? Where do I type the code? How do I run it?”
You open up Wikipedia and start to learn. You see an unknown term there and immediately click to check it’s meaning. The knowledge slowly reveals itself in front of you and you start to gather a solid understanding of the topic and the next steps you need to take. It’s just like those strategy games with revealing maps. The further you go, the more you see. Once you hit a solid bottom, a thing that you clearly understand, you start to go back up to the surface until you have the answers you need to your root question: “How to do it”.
I call this second approach “the hacker’s way” of learning, because you’re not soaking useless information, but hacking the exact knowledge you need. You’re brute-forcing the field of possibilities.
Now, go and learn something.
Originally published at https://borislav.xyz.
