Week 11: Applying what you learn

A big part of bootcamp learning it working out if you are getting frustrated at the right things. For example, I sometimes can’t recall the exact syntax of a particular function. Little things give me an error message like putting a bracket or a comma in the wrong place.

Some days I can spend a lot of time checking documentation or looking through questions on Stack Overflow, the Q&A website for developers.

The answers are out there. Finding them is it’s own skill set however.

I spoke to a friend at Google about this and he said his advice surprised me. Don’t worry, we all do it he said. He made me realise that I was getting worked up about learning very specific little bits of code, even though finding those pieces of information was relatively trivial online.

What is instead more useful, is developing ability to quickly, and without much distraction, find the specific documentation you need before continuing with the work.

Tip: Search for answers in the language other people would use. Try to generalise from your own specific problem to increase your chances of finding something similar online.

Work on processes, not facts

One of the things that is stressed at Ubiqum from the CEO to the mentors is that it is easiest to learn by doing. Learning historic dates, mathematical formulae or coding principles is difficult when learnt in a vacuum.

There are ways to improve your goldfish memory

The time it can take these things to leave your memory again varies from person to person. For me they can be gone in minutes. The past few months have required a thorough reevaluation of how I learn There seems little correlation between content consumed and learning acquired. There however seems a very strong link between content applied and learning achieved.

Application

Say I have a problem I am trying to solve. I do some online research and find a walkthrough or tutorial solving a very similar problem. If a walkthrough has eight steps, working through all eight steps in a row before turning my attention to my problem never works. I quickly, and I mean really quickly forget what I was working on 20 minutes ago. If I’m just following the steps, rather than engaging and applying then the information doesn’t stick in my mind.

If however, I do a step of the walkthrough, then apply that to my own problem, not only do I make progress but I also give myself a better chance of learning.

Throwing time at a learning problems doesn’t necessarily guarantee results.