31–40 of 116 posts
As a noob, I feel this. The weird thing is that I am very well aware that tutorials only feel good because I see progress, but that progress is empty. I am aware that confronting a personal project really settles that knowledge in, but I still postpone personal projects whenever I think “I don’t really understand what this means, maybe I should just finish that online course and I’ll be ready”. Also fighting perfecti…
TFA really only applies to basic new software topics. I'm doing a course in biochemistry right now. It's literally the recording of a course taught at OSU that the professor was extremely generous to make and post on YouTube (thank you, Dr. Ahern!). I'm not sure how I'd ever learn biochemistry without it, seeing as I'm not in college anymore.
Many years ago I used to be very proactive about my learning. I read tons of books, did MOOCs, tutorials, learnt new tools and frameworks... What I found with time is that I forgot most of those. Except for the very basic and foundational concepts, anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone. I can't even remember most of the courses or books I've read. Even worse, in some cases I ended up actually using t…
> Anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone. I think that's true of any method of learning. I once took a class on a proprietary audio visual language, and a year of so later my manager asked me to write some control software using that language, and I basically had to start from scratch. On the other hand, I took Stanford's first MOOC Swift Class, and have been using Swift as my primary language ever si…
I wrote a similar article 2 years ago ( https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science-protips/ ) arguing against MOOCs for learning data science/machine learning skills, as they are not reflective of real world applications. I'm all for personal projects especially in DS/ML (it's how I started my career in the field), but the unfortunate reality is that there's really no way nowadays to learn the hard/boring parts of DS…
If you find a really good tutorial by programmers who are both excellent teachers and experienced in that particular field, it beats JIT learning on a personal project in one important respect. You get exposure to the One True Way of doing things. What do I mean? Years ago, I learned to program iOS from the Big Nerd Ranch book. The most important thing I got out of that was learning enough about the Cocoa-Touch frame…
I'll take this chance to recommend 2 phenomenal free MOOCs: 1. Nand2Tetris[1] which really nails giving the realization (of not understanding just HOW MUCH) complexity there is in the layers upon layers of abstractions programmers use.
2. An introduction to Logic[2] via programming course (by one of the authors of the previous MOOC, Noam Nissan), which introduces logic (an overview that ultimately ends with Godel's completeness/incompleteness) in a relatively (to the rigorous math) approachable manner. The one caveat is the book is still a work in progress, and it has many parts that are not well written.
[1]: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ [2]: https://www.logicthrupython.org/
As a noob, I feel this. The weird thing is that I am very well aware that tutorials only feel good because I see progress, but that progress is empty. I am aware that confronting a personal project really settles that knowledge in, but I still postpone personal projects whenever I think “I don’t really understand what this means, maybe I should just finish that online course and I’ll be ready”. Also fighting perfecti…
The trouble with any of this stuff is that no course/book/tutorial can prepare you for every eventuality, and sooner or later you’re going to want to do a thing that nobody explicitly taught you, with a combination of tools that differs from any tutorial you can find. I think building up skills in the way you’re doing it is great preparation for that eventuality.
We should ban these personal rant posts like 1. Stop doing ** 2. Why I don't like ** 3. You should not ** It's your personal thing. Don't like certain thing - try to do it your own way. Can't do it then change your attitude.
Besides, not everyone has the ability to "do it your own way". Sharing opinions like this can be a good way to determine if there's value in an idea and maybe even get help if needed.
If you find a really good tutorial by programmers who are both excellent teachers and experienced in that particular field, it beats JIT learning on a personal project in one important respect. You get exposure to the One True Way of doing things. What do I mean? Years ago, I learned to program iOS from the Big Nerd Ranch book. The most important thing I got out of that was learning enough about the Cocoa-Touch frame…
I wrote a similar article 2 years ago ( https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science-protips/ ) arguing against MOOCs for learning data science/machine learning skills, as they are not reflective of real world applications. I'm all for personal projects especially in DS/ML (it's how I started my career in the field), but the unfortunate reality is that there's really no way nowadays to learn the hard/boring parts of DS…
How horribly disappointing. I'm at the tail end of a 6 month, $17,000 online DS bootcamp. I've got some great projects and learned a ton but yeh, they seem to be slowly preparing to let us down. They keep saying how hard it will be to find a job and may take months. LOL, I'm screwed.