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The more you learn, the faster you can learn

pranay.gp

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Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#81

Post by jsf01 »

richard23132 wrote: post #79
surelyyoujest wrote: post #66

Basically, Pranay needed to boast his CV to the world and wrote a clickbaity article where half the paragraphs are mentions of his accomplishments and the rest is common sense which can be described as "learn enough to ask good questions and practice."

The first paragraph in which he boasts his achievements is what made me very interested in the article and led to focus reading carefully. I see the boasting is a by product of providing evidence, i don't see boasting alone in the post. It doesn't matter it's useful stuff.

If you clicked on any of the project links you’d see that most of them are exaggerated or misrepresented in the intro. A lot of team efforts for which he gave no credit to the others involved. I can understand the desire to establish authority from a writing perspective, but the author is embellishing his achievements here in a disingenuous way.

Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#82

Post by jsf01 »

There comes a point in the learning process for any subject where you get so excited about the fact that you understand something new that you feel you need to tell everyone about it. This feels like one of those posts—the author has very limited experience, but he has formalized a coherent (albeit unoriginal) idea and because of that exciting feeling he now wants to shout it to the world. It’s good to write as an exercise to help you grow or solidify your ideas, and a post like this, with all its self-congratulatory language, probably would have ended up better if it were written for OP himself rather than for the world. Instead, by publishing it, the author has the need to establish (and, it feels, compensate for) “why I’m qualified to talk about this”. It’s premature to have shared this underdeveloped idea, just as it’s premature for the author to be boasting his achievements.

Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#83

Post by civicsquid »

gingabriska wrote: post #78
civicsquid wrote: post #61

Some of the examples listed when the author speaks about why they are such a good learner felt a bit forced to me. I understand that authority is being established here, but a good number of the early examples seem to be what I would expect from a successful college student who has done an internship or two (e.g. what is recursion, building reusable UI components for a large company). I also clicked through to some o…

If you are in industry and you've some experience, highly likely you are already doing what the author claims to be his fast learning secrets. There are actually no deep secrets I find in his post, all of those things atleast I instictively do. Even my friends use same approach, so I thought it's so common that I don't have to write a blog post about it.

Maybe the technique in this post is common, but I personally believe that putting yourself and your thoughts out there is a good thing for engineers and critical thinkers in general. It allows us to get feedback and involve others on a wider scale, even if that means writing about things that have been discussed or thought about a number of times before.

Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#84

Post by pranaygp »

civicsquid wrote: post #61

Some of the examples listed when the author speaks about why they are such a good learner felt a bit forced to me. I understand that authority is being established here, but a good number of the early examples seem to be what I would expect from a successful college student who has done an internship or two (e.g. what is recursion, building reusable UI components for a large company). I also clicked through to some o…

OP here, great point civicsquid. I got that feedback a lot from people (i.e. spending too much time on the post trying to establish credentials) and that I overdid it.

The point of this post for me is start trying to write (I think I'm pretty bad at it) so I'm extremely thankful for the feedback and glad you found the content itself academic and intriguing. :)

Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#85

Post by perfunctory »

lacampbell wrote: post #36
stan_rogers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." - Ed Post, Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal , 1982. There is a hell of a lot more difference between the various programming languages than their syntax. Natural languages as well - you can render idiomatic English in any language, and if you don't care very much about getting your intended meaning across (and your listeners are both patien…

Eh... once you know a handful of languages, it's fairly easy to adjust to a new one. If I have experience in C++, C#, Ruby and Javascript, do you really think Java is going to blow my mind? Or I won't be able to write decent Python? I'm sure I'd pick up a few tricks and my code would get idiomatic but I am going to be 90% there from day one.

Ok, what was the last language you learned? Can you say you learned only 10% of it since the first day?

Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#86

Post by pranaygp »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #63
pranaygp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here I'm sorry you feel that way :( > idiosyncrasies of their code I've only had about 6 months of processional work experience, 3 months of which have been open source code, so even just learning _their_ code had a huge learning impact on me because I saw it as "wow, this is how code works in production". I think I learnt less about code itself though honestly, and instead learnt the systems and how those people…

You’re both really really green. That job on your resume is worth way more than any learning project, whether is a book or open source or whatever Bad move

green?

Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#87

Post by lacampbell »

perfunctory wrote: post #85
lacampbell wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh... once you know a handful of languages, it's fairly easy to adjust to a new one. If I have experience in C++, C#, Ruby and Javascript, do you really think Java is going to blow my mind? Or I won't be able to write decent Python? I'm sure I'd pick up a few tricks and my code would get idiomatic but I am going to be 90% there from day one.

Ok, what was the last language you learned? Can you say you learned only 10% of it since the first day?

Javascript/Typescript, and yes, pretty much.

This are how you make objects, this are how you make functions, here's constants, here's variables. Use let instead of var for the scoping you're familiar with. Here's a standard library, it's a bit spartan but pretty much everything is familiar.

Later on I stopped using 'class' and 'this' and just used closures that return objects (I consider it more idiomatic, YMMV). I got a good feeling for when to use an object and when to use a Map.

Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#88

Post by cj »

pranaygp wrote: post #86
ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re both really really green. That job on your resume is worth way more than any learning project, whether is a book or open source or whatever Bad move

green?

https://www.google.com/search?q=greenfield+software&rlz=1CDG...

Re: The more you learn, the faster you can learn

#90

Post by lacampbell »

samvher wrote: post #58
lacampbell wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there a lot of Erlang, Prolog and Forth jobs, where you are? Face it, we all pretty much use the same 10 or so languages in industry.

I'm working mostly in Erlang and from what I can tell there is quite some demand for Erlang and Elixir developers. Also there seems to be a lot of demand for Scala developers which while based on Java is not the same as those 10 languages. I've also used PostScript in a work context (which is stack based like Forth).

That's pretty cool. Erlang interests me, mainly because of what a amazing speaker the late great Joe Armstrong was. I don't really solve a lot of Erlang shaped problems right now, however.

My situation is this - people see my CV, see those languages, and immediately dismiss me for Java jobs. I think it's a short sighted decision, but it's the thinking that permeates the industry.

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