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I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

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Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#21

Post by TeMPOraL »

hguant wrote: post #18
TeMPOraL wrote: post #7

I did something similar over last year at work. I put a section called "Insight from today" in the default template I use(d) for everyday work notes, in which I wanted - hoped - to put something new I've learned. Turned out, I'm not learning new things too much at my $dayjob (or my attitude is wrong). Ultimately, I was disappointed, but it made me reconsider just how much I'm really implicitly learning - turns out th…

Unrelated to the substance of your comment, thank you for putting up those citation links.

They were part of their respective notes, I just reformatted them to be in one place in this comment :).

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#22

Post by jacquesm »

enugu wrote: post #19
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #16

The approach the author used here is similar to using flashcard apps like anki, except not as well fleshed out. Normally, in a flashcard app, you would write down a question and an answer. So you can review the question, and see if you can answer it or not. He wrote this down all as a oneliner for each of his "learnings". Its nice to see a frequency graph to see how often you are learning, but it doesn't really serve…

This thread[1] by Michael Nielsen is a good description of the use of spaced repetition to memorize things. [1] https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/95776322945477427...

Here is a pretty exhaustive (Gwern style) overview of SRS:

https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#23

Post by henrik_w »

I wrote down everything I learnt from 13 years of solving tricky bugs (194 entries in the file). A very useful and interesting habit that I'm still following.

I distilled the most important lessons here:

https://henrikwarne.com/2016/06/16/18-lessons-from-13-years-...

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#24

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

enugu wrote: post #19
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #16

The approach the author used here is similar to using flashcard apps like anki, except not as well fleshed out. Normally, in a flashcard app, you would write down a question and an answer. So you can review the question, and see if you can answer it or not. He wrote this down all as a oneliner for each of his "learnings". Its nice to see a frequency graph to see how often you are learning, but it doesn't really serve…

This thread[1] by Michael Nielsen is a good description of the use of spaced repetition to memorize things. [1] https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/95776322945477427...

This is insightful, some of his tweets I found written there I didn't find elsewhere.

- For 9000 cards+, reviews 100 cards a day in 20 minutes

- Delete 1 or 2 % of cards that are poorly made

- Reading a science paper is 0 to 5 questions unless to understand it well its 20 to 40.

- Enter cards through desktop app, review on mobile (this i do already)

- If memorizing saves 5 minutes in future, put it down

I only have a few hundred cards or so, I only add a handful of cards a week at best.

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#25

Post by thenobsta »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #5

I am a fan of being able to take notes, log your own behaviour (and track time) and do other things off the command line. I like the approach. Pedagogically speaking, I'm curious if this will actually help. It seems to me that note taking and review is definitely an important part of learning, but I've found that writing out in long-hand and being able to draw diagrams helps considerably. None of it useful without re…

I'm starting to begin the same set of things(logging, trackign...). Just curious, do you have any tools you like?

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#26

Post by demilicious »

dgritsko wrote: post #15
lwerdna wrote: post #11

Here's a poor man's version of dnote in my .bashrc. It's the only thing I've used consistently: notes() { local fpath=$HOME/notes.md if [ "$1" == "gvim" ]; then gvim + $fpath elif [ "$1" == "vim" ]; then gvim + $fpath elif [ "$1" == "date" ]; then echo '' >> $fpath echo '# '`date +"%m-%d-%Y-%T"` >> $fpath echo '---------------------' >> $fpath elif [ "$1" == "" ]; then less +G $fpath else echo '' >> $fpath echo $@ >>…

I really appreciate the minimalism of this approach. Going to give this a try, thanks for sharing!

Yeah, this is really useful. I think it'll break on single quotes: `notes we'll need oranges tomorrow`, but otherwise, it's a very low-friction method, to me.

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#27

Post by jihadjihad »

infomofo wrote: post #20

I've been doing something similar using jrnl. I use hashtags so I could theoretically look up stuff in the past. I.e. > jrnl "@vim type _:noh_ to remove the last search's highlighting" And then a week later when I can't remember, I could use > jrnl -n 10 -and @vim

Hadn't heard of jrnl before. Love how clean it is and the tagging is awesome. Will definitely be using this, thanks!

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#28

Post by Froyoh »

lwerdna wrote: post #11

Here's a poor man's version of dnote in my .bashrc. It's the only thing I've used consistently: notes() { local fpath=$HOME/notes.md if [ "$1" == "gvim" ]; then gvim + $fpath elif [ "$1" == "vim" ]; then gvim + $fpath elif [ "$1" == "date" ]; then echo '' >> $fpath echo '# '`date +"%m-%d-%Y-%T"` >> $fpath echo '---------------------' >> $fpath elif [ "$1" == "" ]; then less +G $fpath else echo '' >> $fpath echo $@ >>…

Can this be used with nano as well?

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#29

Post by messy_desk »

The author tries to extract some quantitative information from his notes. There isn't really anything there though, otherwise than trivialities like "we don't learn as much as we think we do", with the pretty severe disclaimers that this is only one person, only one month, and taking notes is not the same as learning something.

It might have been more interesting to understand qualitatively what realizations he actually made and how his mindset progressed. But when you see the titles of his notes they are things like "true is a program that returns with a zero exit code". So not much there either.

This is a pretty thinly disguised ad for the author's note-taking software.

Re: I Wrote Down Everything I Learned While Programming for a Month

#30

Post by cortesoft »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #10
codingdave wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd ask a different question, of why do you need to measure it in the first place? I learn more about our codebase, my productivity goes up -- I deliver more updates, with less bugs, faster as I learn. Do I need to measure the details of how much I learned? Or is it sufficient to just know that I'm grokking more each day, and that is reflected in my work? Isn't that the mantra of BI? Be careful what you measure, beca…

> Isn't that the mantra of BI? Be careful what you measure, because that is what you will improve. The corollary is that you don't improve what you don't measure. > Or is it sufficient to just know that I'm grokking more each day, and that is reflected in my work? OP's point is, I believe, that you don't know that you're really grokking much of anything and how much it's actually reflected in your work, because you'r…

> The corollary is that you don't improve what you don't measure.

I mean, this is a nice saying, but it is pretty clearly not true. Lots of things that aren't measured are improved; we have not measured my two year olds vocabulary at all, but it is certainly improving.

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