I like to learn by doing. Either I’ll create something new or contribute to open source. Creating something new is usually easier for me and leads to a deeper understanding. The hard part is thinking of something that I want to spend my time on.
Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
#12Is it really computer science you want to learn more of, or software development? If it's the latter, you just learn by doing. Keep coding and do research when you get stuck. Don't believe someone who says that something cannot be done.
So this. Go down rabbit holes when you get stuck. Understand your tools deeper as time goes on. Learn by doing. You can't learn programming by reading. Learning programming has more in common with plumbing and carpentry than medicine and law in this regard.
Re: Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
#13Hanging out on HN is a good start. If you spend time doing a lot of OOP at school, try learning a Functional language. It’s a great paradigm that will improve your general programming style.
Learn a language by making something interesting, i.e. web app, GUI, raspberry pi project....there are millions of ideas and things to do out there, so pick the most doable and exciting one to you so you can complete it, or at least make usable!
Re: Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
#14For the most part, four things have done it for me:
1. Reading academic papers.
2. Being very hands-on; always implementing something, even it means trial and error. (Re #1: A lot of times, I end up implementing ideas from interesting papers that I’ve read.)
3. Doing my best to be around smart folks and learn from them (i.e., going to technical events, developing mentors, etc.).
4. Never giving up! This seems cliché to say, but forcing that mindset on myself has helped me tremendously for especially hard topics/domains (e.g., distributed systems). (Even if I have to reread a paper 10x before I fully understand it, I’m willing to do that.)
Re: Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
#15Find a real person with a real problem and use algorithms to help them solve it. https://xkcd.com/1831/
Re: Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
#16For the most part, four things have done it for me: 1. Reading academic papers. 2. Being very hands-on; always implementing something, even it means trial and error. (Re #1: A lot of times, I end up implementing ideas from interesting papers that I’ve read.) 3. Doing my best to be around smart folks and learn from them (i.e., going to technical events, developing mentors, etc.). 4. Never giving up! This seems cliché…
How does one find out about academic papers? Is there some source that lists: here are the academic papers this week?
Re: Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
#17> tried many times to learn new things but I always get bored with the courses and start another topic leaving the previous incomplete.
There are a lot of tricks people might recommend, but learning to stick with something that is boring is important. Track your progress visually in some personally meaningful way
Re: Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
#18For the most part, four things have done it for me: 1. Reading academic papers. 2. Being very hands-on; always implementing something, even it means trial and error. (Re #1: A lot of times, I end up implementing ideas from interesting papers that I’ve read.) 3. Doing my best to be around smart folks and learn from them (i.e., going to technical events, developing mentors, etc.). 4. Never giving up! This seems cliché…
How does one find out about academic papers? Is there some source that lists: here are the academic papers this week?
You can check out https://blog.acolyer.org/
It's run by a guy called Adrian Colyer, he picks up a good research paper every weekday and summarises it on the blog. He's very regular and covers about 200 papers per year. Topics covered mainly revolve around data science (ML, AI, etc) and data engineering (DBMS, distributed systems, etc), and to a lesser extent general software engineering and systems stuff.
Re: Ask HN: How to you learn anything new in Computer Science?
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