The spiral of learning
sdqali.in
The spiral of learning
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: The spiral of learning
#2I know exactly what you mean. Someone smart once told me to pick one thing and do it very well, this I did. I mastered one technology and because a go-to guy on it, based my career off it and now I'm a bit bored of it and want to transfer across to something else. I'm finding this hard.
Re: The spiral of learning
#3I used to be in the exact same position. Switching between different languages, paradigms, frameworks helps immensely in narrowing down you're area of interest. I spent a significant amount of time playing with python, tried thinking "pythonically" and using it as my side-project language. But after about a year I never got comfortable, maybe it was the mature community surrounding the language or its opinionated nature.
Anyway, I distinctly remember learning about Clojure, and being completely enamored with the ideas Rich Hickey talked about. I would still get bored of doing 4clojure problems, but instead of abandoning them for a different subject entirely I would watch a ClojureConj video, read a blog on a Clojure library, or even just practice some of the tooling like emacs key-chords.
I believe the learning process is better when it is erratic, both for you're own sanity and the overall completeness of a knowledge domain you can acquire after jumping around from topic to topic.
5 months in, I am trying to push Clojure/Cljs ideas into the C# shop I work at, and upholding my promise to do SOMETHING regarding the language or tooling every night.
Our brains seem to work best this way, storing an idea in our subconscious after rigorous study allows us to process it in the background. I find myself frequently daydreaming about language constructs or architectural designs.
Re: The spiral of learning
#4I used to be in the exact same position. Switching between different languages, paradigms, frameworks helps immensely in narrowing down you're area of interest. I spent a significant amount of time playing with python, tried thinking "pythonically" and using it as my side-project language. But after about a year I never got comfortable, maybe it was the mature community surrounding the language or its opinionated nat…
Why Clojure instead of F# or more advanced C#?
Re: The spiral of learning
#5I generally am not one to recommend specific books, but I read one a while back that I think would be relevant here. It's called Mastery by George Leonard. I'm very much the same way as you, characterized as being a "dabbler" in the book. I would definitely recommend giving it a read. Or two. Here's a scribd link, though its legality seems dubious: http://www.scribd.com/doc/257928/-Mastery-by-George-Leonard
Re: The spiral of learning
#6reminded me of a book:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Soccer-Explains-World-Globalizatio...
Re: The spiral of learning
#7Couldn't identify with this more, the worst part is when you spend so much time circling that you start to forget the things you originally learned, or at least think you do.
However I have noticed the same effect, especially when you have circled once or twice back to the same well your brain has learned more than you know, and thinking in that way is much easier now that you have had time to work through it and let your brain rest a bit.
I think on some level you cant make yourself feel bad for being a jack of all trades, and you can setup methods to reinforce going back to the well of whatever you were working on.
One of my compatriots who does this has a dedicated but somewhat more closed off friend who doesn't look around for new things. They challenge each other to see who can accomplish the most in some specific language, style, whatever . The flighty but open one now is challenged by someone who is more dedicated to the task, and as they keep it light hearted. Together they make some interesting stuff and are a pretty good team.
Re: The spiral of learning
#8I generally am not one to recommend specific books, but I read one a while back that I think would be relevant here. It's called Mastery by George Leonard. I'm very much the same way as you, characterized as being a "dabbler" in the book. I would definitely recommend giving it a read. Or two. Here's a scribd link, though its legality seems dubious: http://www.scribd.com/doc/257928/-Mastery-by-George-Leonard
I just read the first 60 (out of 179) pages of the book - and I would've said that OP was characterised as a "Hacker."
This is because a "Dabbler's" skill goes back down to 0 in the short term, and this is not what is happening to the OP.
Re: The spiral of learning
#9If you zoom out, it looks like you are really only "spiraling" within or two (relatively) niche topics: Newly Popular Programming Languages and Understanding/Using Data With Computers.
Maybe you need to broaden your horizons a bit to find something that truly interests you and dramatically increases the things you can do as an engineering/scientifically-minded person?
Re: The spiral of learning
#10Yes, I (and many others) have exactly same problem. I feel like I'm getting better in committing to specific goals over time though.
One of the key things here is to think about what you want and clearly define your goals. But you may find yourself in the situation when it's hard to understand what you want. Then, I think, it's ok to play around with small projects shorterm without strict commitment. This helps to try many different things and finally find what you like.