On doing the boring work

or how I stopped pretending I was learning and started using flashcards.

I’m currently learning to code at Makers Academy bootcamp.

Last week was my first week of the precourse and I knew the drill. This wasn’t my first rodeo.

Step 1. quickly skip through the assigned texts

Step 2. skip straight to the exercises (with the aid of lots of googling to complete them of course)

Step 3. feel quite smug about how quickly I’ve completed everything

repeat steps 1 and 2 for a couple months then proceed to step 4

Step 4. start an exciting career as a junior developer

Step 5. ooodles of money and job satisfaction

This is pretty much how I’ve done all of my learning whether it be on codeacademy or codewars or any other online ruby tutorial has gone up to now. I’ve taken similar approaches in the past to get through school, college and many jobs. Learn as little as I need to get by and wing the rest. This methodology is great for tricking yourself that you’re learning lots with the minimum of effort(i.e. me feeling good about myself!).

Look at how little work I put in and the great/okay results I achieve.

However whilst this is fun and I feel good, I’m not sure how effective this is for learning stuff deeply. (You also often feel like an enormous lazy imposter charlatan but that’s for another post).

Q: Did I get a huge feeling of satisfaction when I solved that super tricky kata on codewars using the handy regex I found on Stack Overflow?

A: Hell yeah.

Q: Do I now remember how I solved that codewars kata and be able to solve a similar problem again?

A: Do I shite. (Irish for “No, no I most certainly do not”)

So I’m going back and doing something I haven’t done since primary school and doing rote memorization. I’m building flash cards (which I’ve never done before) using Anki, a rather cool little program which helps with spaced learning. Check them out here.

I’ve deleted reddit and twitter off my phone and now Anki is my new go-to in case of boredom app. I’m doing the boring work. I really want to learn this stuff well. It really matters.

I’ll let you know how I get on in coming weeks.