But it takes ages
Learning anything properly, in general, takes ages
Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
31–40 of 167 posts
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#32Earlier 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/
This is really quite neat. Love both the idea and the execution.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#33I'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.
I’m having this problem now. I want to publish a post about recent months of progress on my project, but while writing it I found the solution isn’t complete and still has some flaws, so I feel I must put some more weeks of work into the code first before I can publish the post…
I’m trying to practice writing “this doesn’t work yet” acknowledging in the post that it isn’t fully done, and publishing the bloody thing. We will see how it works next time I sit down to write!
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#34Writing is fine, but publishing is another story. Makes me think of Eisenhower's "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable". Write, but then throw away your shit. IMO and I'm sorry to say it so bluntly, but articles like this are just adding to the already omnipresent noise. I am constantly blasted with tidbits, noobs' their "tutorials" and summaries of summaries. I'm a louzy writer myself. So it's not like I…
> IMO and I'm sorry to say it so bluntly, but articles like this are just adding to the already omnipresent noise. I am constantly blasted with tidbits, noobs' their "tutorials" and summaries of summaries.
In the 90's it struck me that the entire internet was trying to be page 1 of something and every article assumed the reader knew nothing. I optimistically hoped that, like when writing a book, multiple pages would be written. Something better than replacing the chapters of a book with domain names would eventually be found. Hell, books would find their way onto the internet as html documents.
I've been wrong before.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#35For the past 10 years, I've documented everything I've learned on any topics, most often non-technical ones. Whenever I revisit a topic, I refine and update my knowledge base. I use a private github repo with textual files. This has helped to increase my knowledge tremendously.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#36This was why I started writing about unintended consequences (unintendedconsequenc.es). I'd choose something I became interested in and would try to explain it to myself. I mostly moved on from the topic, but am using this technique for the next thing now.
One note about the way that worked for me -- don't write for anyone but yourself. I went as far as to keep my name off what I published for a year so I wouldn't be self-conscious about it.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#37People working in science have employed this process for a long time. Hit your local academic library and look for periodicals called "Annual Review of whatever". More generally, look for review articles and you'll see their work product. Some of these articles are stunningly informative: Feynman's approach works. Review articles are not the same as meta-analyses; they aren't attempting to evaluate novel hypotheses u…
> People working in science have employed this process for a long time. Hit your local academic library and look for periodicals called "Annual Review of whatever". More generally, look for review articles and you'll see their work product. Some of these articles are stunningly informative: Feynman's approach works.
When you referenced people in science, I thought your example would be a laboratory log. That would indeed be an example of writing about what you learn, while you are learning it. Lab log is also a genre where the intended audience is the author himself, much like a diary. A lab log does not require originality - you may be documenting in it how you performed a certain bench technique that thousands upon thousands of people have done before you.
A review article is a different genre altogether. It has an audience other than the writer. It requires some originality of thought. There is no need to write a review article if a similar one has just been published. Nor would working through a particular protocol from an established book of protocols (aka the docs) be considered worthy of a review article.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#38Yes. And then share with the world, and who cares if anyone pays attention.
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 :-)
You need to refer to your own ideas as inane and to your following as a band of idiots because you know that is how the average reader likes to think of those, how they think of you as a random person on the internet.
I've had more than enough feedback. Only one item remained that was useful, it boils down to: If you think topic X is worth exploring go do the f* work so that you can have a conversation with people who know something about X. They shouldn't care for your thoughts if you know nothing about the domain, they will bother to listen if you know the basics, they will give you time, attention and wonderful feedback if you know the topic well. They don't want to be your helpdesk, they want an exchange of thoughts. You will also be able to judge how great their expertise is which helps a lot ignoring and avoiding [negative] feedback from people who know nothing, are unwilling to learn and/or unable to think constructively about that what is important or precious to you - like exploring your imagination.
I have a thousand great ideas that exist only in my head. At any time at least 999 of them are not progressing.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#39The hardest class, in terms of failure rates, in first year CS in my university was Discrete Mathematics. I got an A- and was pretty proud of myself.
In third year, I became a TA for the course, marking assignments and hosting tutoring office hours. That's when I discovered that apparently I had learned nothing when I got that A-.
Teaching a subject requires you to actually understand it, and not just know enough to pass the test.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#40I'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 use it for publishing tech opinions.
A few weeks ago I found out you can have GitHub Pages with a custom domain, so I extracted my posts, converted them to Markdown, and now I run Hugo. So much easier, and I don’t fret about what imaginary people might think about me.