I started writing a book to teach myself Rust but ended up teaching myself how to write. I've found that I have a much deeper understanding of the language now because I have to actually explain things in detail, and not just get the program to compile and move on. But I would say that the biggest side effect has been learning to write well. That has turned out to be much more impactful to my career than learning Rust.
Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
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Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#82I remember an old PhD comics strip where a professor says “Remember kids, the only difference between fooling around and science is writing it down.”. In the context the goal was obviously for it to be funny but it is actually a very good and wise advice.
That's in the context of recording data from experiments, though
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#83I started writing a book to teach myself Rust but ended up teaching myself how to write. I've found that I have a much deeper understanding of the language now because I have to actually explain things in detail, and not just get the program to compile and move on. But I would say that the biggest side effect has been learning to write well. That has turned out to be much more impactful to my career than learning Rus…
> That has turned out to be much more impactful to my career than learning Rust.
Could it be that people assume you know rust if you write a book about rust?
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#84I like writing but I think the whole “write it and you’ll get it” doesn’t work for me.
It’s just extra effort. Writing is fun for the sake of writing. But I’ve not ever found it helpful for me to remember stuff or whatever.
Either the subject matter makes sense on first pass, or I just need to practice it like math or something a few times and it sticks.
Either you get it or you don’t. And write for fun.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#85I write my thoughts in table and for each abstraction/concept in a cell and ask myself if I need to understand a sub concept to implement it? And put it in a cell in the next column one row below. Sorta like: https://pasteboard.co/GJUcTLVI8jEn.png
I keep breaking down the concept until I am happy with the level of abstraction and I can open it up tomorrow and not be like: " Hmm this sub concept is opaque and it should not be"
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#86I remember an old PhD comics strip where a professor says “Remember kids, the only difference between fooling around and science is writing it down.”. In the context the goal was obviously for it to be funny but it is actually a very good and wise advice.
The only difference between fooling around and science is p < 0.05 ?
It's still science even with a low p value! It's just a negative result instead of a positive one. Such results really ought to be published, even if they aren't usually.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#87I remember an old PhD comics strip where a professor says “Remember kids, the only difference between fooling around and science is writing it down.”. In the context the goal was obviously for it to be funny but it is actually a very good and wise advice.
Wow, that's actually deeper than it sounds. I do wonder though: did a lot of famous scientists (like Einstein, Feynman, Turing, etc) use writing as a vehicle for learning?
Feynman was famous for stealing his coworkers’ pens and pencils so I have to assume he was writing useful thing down.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#88See one, do one, teach one is the mantra in medicine.
In the military it was common to hear, "you don't know something until you can teach a class on it." So there was an expectation that everyone should be able to pass on the skills they are responsible for.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#89I started publishing "TIL" posts a few years ago and everything in this post here resonated 100% with my experience of writing those.
The great thing about TILs is that once you form a solid set of habits around them they can be extremely quick to put together: the majority of my TIL posts take between 15 minutes and half an hour to write.
I make extensive personal notes on everything I'm doing (in GitHub issues threads or VS Code scratch documents) - turning those into a TIL is mainly about pasting those notes into a Markdown file and tidying them up a bit.
https://til.simonwillison.net/ is my collection so far.
I get a huge amount of value out of these. I don't particularly care if other people read them, the value is in helping me better understand the material and enabling me to refer back to them in the future.
I refer to some of them multiple times every week! This one for example, about Python packaging with pyproject.toml: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#90I enjoy writing down thoughts, the writing down the idea is really satisfying. I've been writing down ideas since 2013. I just use markdown README.md on GitHub, they're all public and open to people to read.
I think writing is part of thinking.
I frequently reread my notes.
I would like to go into more depth with more thoughts but I am usually in pattern matching and permutation searching mode.