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Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

addyosmani.com

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Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#111

Post by sph »

hoherd wrote: post #24
sph wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a paradox. I'd rather no one reads my ramblings, but then why am I writing them? Somehow I feel it is a shame that most of my inane ideas only exist in my head. The freeing approach is just to write, know you're a terrible writer, and persevere. I guess that's how you become good, eventually, or maybe you get a following of other idiots that agree with your dumb thoughts :-)

This is why I don't blog, and instead take notes that are publicly accessible. They're for me to refer to, but others may find them useful and I may want to share examples with my coworkers and friends, so I make them public. EG: https://danielhoherd.com/tech-notes/exiftool/

That's quite neat, but I would say that's more effort than a post, at least for me.

A post is a synthesized idea that has been going on in my head for a while. Write it and forget about it.

Your tech notes are a labour of love that need constant maintenance, which I'm not prepared to do.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#112

Post by stainablesteel »

writing in general is a beautiful tool to give structure to your own understanding of anything.

i'm also genuinely convinced that people do this quite naturally, but that school beats this habit out of you as it replaces what you would normally do with what you're required to do. once you take people's free will out of the equation, their own natural talents suffer the consequences.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#113

Post by wuliwong »

I definitely find this to be true. I started with a little notepad calculation on the question of "what if we replaced all gas cars with EVs?" I started adding some details and eventually put it out for anyone to see https://www.capsulel.ink/capsules/what-if-all-the-gasoline-c...

Kinda an amateur "publication."

It seemed so simple but the more I work with the question it gets more detailed and nuanced and I also keep finding errors in what should be an embarrassingly simple calculation. I think putting things like this out in the world and getting feedback is another valuable tool. I guess the author talks about attempting to teach it, which is part, but I also think getting criticism from people that know about what you are writing about is very valuable too.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#114

Post by GCA10 »

Extra bonus for writing about your learning journey . . .

Even for potential readers have been in the field for a long time, these posts can be supremely informative. It's great to hear about newcomers' shortcuts, some of which are mind-stretching for the old guard. And expressing a sincere interest in getting better is a great way to get support from existing experts who are glad to share.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#115

Post by jweatherby »

wuliwong wrote: post #113

I definitely find this to be true. I started with a little notepad calculation on the question of "what if we replaced all gas cars with EVs?" I started adding some details and eventually put it out for anyone to see https://www.capsulel.ink/capsules/what-if-all-the-gasoline-c... Kinda an amateur "publication." It seemed so simple but the more I work with the question it gets more detailed and nuanced and I also keep…

Where is the best place you've found to receive this feedback?

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#116

Post by brabel »

winter_blue wrote: post #56
p4bl0 wrote: post #50

I 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?

Einstein was really good at thought experiments... and if I remember correctly, he said once that he sometimes had "trouble" to express thoughts in words.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#117

Post by hodgesrm »

sgarland wrote: post #42
Xymist wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depth. Depth would be a useful differentiator. I need a few thousand words that actually teach me something, not three paragraphs that vaguely gesture in the direction of an idea.

THIS. My favorite example is Jeremy Cole’s blog [0], especially the stuff on InnoDB. You want to take a deep dive into the murky internals of MySQL? This is it. Tons of other stuff as well, but those are my favorite. He wrote tooling to visualize .ibd files FFS. [0]: https://blog.jcole.us/

+1. Jeremy is well-informed and excellent at explaining technical topics. He and others like Jeremy Zawodny were major forces for good in the MySQL community back in the days of MySQL AB.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#118

Post by Nezteb »

sgarland wrote: post #40
dikei wrote: post #7

I've tried to create a tech blog for a long time. But because I'm quite OCD about my writing, it took ages to create a post. In the end, writing became such a chore that I stopped altogether.

My blocker was in infra shaming (from myself). I had started on WordPress years ago on a t3.micro instance, and all was well. Then I wanted to self-host since I have a substantial homelab and at the time, was an SRE. But I knew that my K8s (k3os technically) cluster wasn’t great, and I wasn’t using Helm correctly, and… all of this made me think I had to get everything perfect, exactly how I wanted it, before I could…

I have this exact same problem.

Went from GHP/Jekyll (2012), to GHP/Hugo (2013), to GHP/Hexo (2014), to headless WordPress/React (2017), to Ghost (2018), to Netlify CMS (2019), to Vercel/Gatsby (2020), to Astro (2021), to custom Elixir/Phoenix (2022), to Micro.blog and Substack (2023)... (dates are approximate within ~6 months)

I'm still debating what to do next. My motivations go back and forth between "learn some new tech" and "write the dang thing".

Either way, I'd really like to stick to something for more than a year. Ideally I'd separate my "site" and "blog".

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#120

Post by simonw »

lfx wrote: post #109
simonw wrote: post #89

I 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 thre…

You mister Simon, you are the inspiration! For TILs and Py modules. I wonder what's drives you to make so many Py modules? Do you see reusing modules for your own projects or do you have some other grand plan?

For me, the single most important thing about Open Source is that it means I can solve a problem once and then /never have to solve that problem ever again/ in the future.

So any code I write I like to open source, because that's the best possible way I know of ensuring I won't have to waste time solving that same problem again.

The other thing that helps is that I think I've found a cure for project guilt.

I used to feel guilty about my projects - each one was Yet Another Thing that I should be spending more time on.

The fix I discovered was to make sure every single one of them has good test coverage and comprehensive documentation.

Effectively I treat each one as something which can stand on its own if I effectively abandon it - the thing works, and is documented, and other people can use it as-is without me feeling guilty that I'm not constantly actively working on improving it.

I wrote more about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/

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