Feb 15, 2021
Chingu Weekly Update vol. 134
Shout-outs & Showcases
🗣 Calling all beta testers & anyone willing to provide feedback on a new Chingu program!
I’m currently working on a free accountability program for self-taught developers and would love to do some beta testing / chatting with anyone willing to help out.
If interested, please fill out this form and I’ll reach out with more info: → https://forms.gle/BPMZhfJFA6R7V8339
🔥 Reminder: Voyage 28 will be starting on March 1st!
🔥 As always, we’re matching people for pair-programming sessions this week. Checkout #chingu-news in Discord to find the link to sign-up!
Overheard in Chingu
damn in my gordon ramsay voice
QUESTION: What is the deal with package-lock.json?
because I can be quite open with online friends and close friends in rl but when it gets to new people and work life etc I’m like: talk? me? what? no thanks
do it for your architect please
There we go. New temporary office, in the living room
room for lots of code on that left one
my dad got a laptop from his school once as “borrowed” but it became so old after a while
they just let him keep it
Getting in the weeds with JS tutorials at the start talking about prototypical inheritance, factories and constructors. It’s overwhelming stuff to learn early on that doesn’t have much payoff. I look at it as “how long until I’m productive” and a lot of that stuff just held me back and had limited payoff. Maybe that’s due to how JS evolved after I learned and using React over Angular, but it’s the sort of thing I’d advise others against getting tied up with now — learn those things when you need to learn them. There is no one size all approach to learning but I’m finding there aren’t many courses/platforms designed to teach in the way that is best for me, personally. For instance, I spent 2 hours this morning watching a Golang course (for Chingu project) feeling like I’m learning very little and then watched a 25 min YouTube video of someone building a REST API with Golang, paused to google everything I didn’t understand, and now can actually be productive. I could watch that entire Golang course and not achieve what I did in 30 minutes. It’s not that simple as you still need to know the basics but I’ve come to terms with there will always be things I don’t know and I will always forget slice vs. splice so it’s better for me to just target being productive and the steps to it.
Disclaimer: I am not very smart. I mean, I’m not one of those people who can understand all the minutiae of JS under the hood and build my own compiler. So that’s not part of my learning aspirations so my approach is different than some who can work on that level.
Been thinking this week how dated and stagnant our learning platforms are as developers. Two major improvements I’d love, regardless of how feasible they are to build: 1) Make courses interactive with paths where you can customize the lessons based on what you already know (“Yes, I know static typing.”, “Yes, I know data structures”, “Yes, I know REST”) — eliminate 80% of the repeat fluff that makes learning so boring and get to the exciting, new stuff. 2) Offer an advanced track where you start by building the thing you want to do, and make all displayed code clickable that will either go to definitions or associated lesson. Basically, working your way backwards and learning what is essential to your end goal. For beginners, I think slow and clear is the best way to learn but once you are past that it’s an absolute slog to do tutorials because the inevitably assume you are a beginner and don’t know what is repetitive and thus a waste of time. Not that beginner courses couldn’t be improved through similar methods (I look back on all the time I wasted learning stuff with objects and classes in JS that rarely ever come up in work/projects — it’s time wasted because I ended up lacking the skills that are actually applicable). What do you all think? Am I crazy or do others relate to some of this?
It looks like a modern tamagotchi
already on 1st page and its all disagree to everything
yup got 100% introverted again
Resources of the Week
Great share by MasihTak:
Before you Go!
You can learn more about Chingu & how to join us at https://chingu.io
