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How to learn hard things in tech

technicallychallenged.substack.com

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Re: How to learn hard things in tech

#31

Post by chii »

blowski wrote: post #9
lordnacho wrote: post #4

IME the hard thing is not something that there's accessible examples for. If there's a tutorial or an example project, you'll figure it out eventually. The thing that's hard is something like how to make a project maintainable. You have to have the experience of screwing it up over a long period of time, feeling the pain each time there's a bug to find or a new feature to implement. You won't find a tutorial in how t…

Yes, learning what syntax you need to write to make something execute is knowledge. When to use that approach is wisdom. My biggest challenge is recognising that, having learned a particular approach, it doesn't need applying everywhere. For example, just because I know how to configure Kubernetes, it doesn't mean I need to host every application with Kubernetes.

Knowledge is information you can recall. Wisdom is knowledge you know how to apply.

Re: How to learn hard things in tech

#32

Post by jxm262 »

dodyg wrote: post #3

>Start with the smallest working example —it doesn’t matter where this comes from, it could be a website, blog, the documentation for the technology, a friend or coworker, it could be from anywhere. This is your basic working example. It’s the baseline for building further knowledge. This is the main idea behind over 400+ micro samples I created for ASP.NET Core https://github.com/dodyg/practical-aspnetcore

I don't even work nor have much interest in ASP.NET Core , but I just starred your repo and plan to read through it.

First time I've seen such a well put together list of code samples for a language. Would love this in other languages

Re: How to learn hard things in tech

#33

Post by rschachte »

abdusco wrote: post #25
dodyg wrote: post #3

>Start with the smallest working example —it doesn’t matter where this comes from, it could be a website, blog, the documentation for the technology, a friend or coworker, it could be from anywhere. This is your basic working example. It’s the baseline for building further knowledge. This is the main idea behind over 400+ micro samples I created for ASP.NET Core https://github.com/dodyg/practical-aspnetcore

Is there a similar resource for golang? One that goes over things you need when developing for a cloud native app, for example. There's gobyexample.com, but it contains usually basic stuff to get started with the language.

Read the book Distributed Services in Go. You implement a complex micro service oriented commit log like Kafka. The code is beautiful and the author created Kafka.

Re: How to learn hard things in tech

#36

Post by koinedad »

lordnacho wrote: post #4

IME the hard thing is not something that there's accessible examples for. If there's a tutorial or an example project, you'll figure it out eventually. The thing that's hard is something like how to make a project maintainable. You have to have the experience of screwing it up over a long period of time, feeling the pain each time there's a bug to find or a new feature to implement. You won't find a tutorial in how t…

Yeah there’s definitely different types of hard things that don’t fit this

Re: How to learn hard things in tech

#38

Post by xupybd »

363849473754 wrote: post #30
anonymousDan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good resources for proofs and/or abstract algebra?

for proofs i really liked two sources: susanna epps’s discrete math book and also rosen’s discrete math text (though epp’s is friendlier for the beginner) supplement those books with these lecture videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-gb0E4MII28GykmtuBXNUNo... they appear to follow rosen but they’re the same topics you’d see in epp if you’re the complete beginner go with epp and then use rosen as a supplement…

This is what makes HN amazing. I now have a much better path to learning something that I've been struggling with for some time.

Re: How to learn hard things in tech

#39

Post by mnahkies »

pca006132 wrote: post #23
omega3 wrote: post #14

When I encounter something new and hard I try to find a conference presentation around this topic. I'm guessing public speaking in a time constrained format really forces speakers to prepare well and provides the best time/information balance. Even better if there are questions from the audience that dig deeper into the why questions.

Perhaps I'm a slow learner, but it is really hard for me to understand something just by watching a conference presentation. I can usually get some basic idea about the topic, but as soon as it gets into the technical details, I am always lost. I can only learn by reading the slides/notes, typical talks are just a bit too fast for me.

I've found the value I get is more in the exposure to ideas or projects I hadn't otherwise heard about, and a jumping off point to learn more. For example I first heard about wireguard at a conference talk
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