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Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on

Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals. What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms of interpersonal teaching. Any approach to learning stuff "quickly" should take seriously Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem. [1] Partly offloading your learning problem onto an expert tutor trained in master learning has a good chance of vastly exceeding any learning approach a novice can adopt on their own. The internet has thus far failed to support this learning model, I think because it would be incredibly expensive for students. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

LewisVerstappen 5y ago
> Partly offloading your learning problem onto an expert tutor trained in master learning has a good chance of vastly exceeding any learning approach a novice can adopt on their own. How have you implemented this in your own learnings?
- popcube 5y ago
  maybe some student read this article and forgot to learning from their teachers in university?
Jensson 5y ago
You need to balance having an expert and not having an expert around. Having an expert around to quickly learn the basics is great, but you will never reach the same level as that expert without learning how to learn on your own. This is the key difference between people at higher levels, there are no experts that can teach you there so it all depends on how good you are at self learning.
- BarryMilo 5y ago
  What do you mean "higher levels"? Is there some forbidden knowledge that must not be written down? Because if not, all levels have experts who can teach you.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    The experts exist, but can you get access to them?
  - Jensson 5y ago
    There is a lot of knowledge you can't write down since you yourself don't know what it is, you just know how to apply it. For example, how do you structure your programs? You can write down some rules of thumb, but you can't write down your entire decision process as a flow chart that can be used on any program to structure every function in them. How to structure big programs is one of the biggest hurdles for new programmers, they just have to learn it themselves since nobody can teach them that. You can get a bit of feedback for simple program structures, but for more complex cases you wont even get good feedback, to continue to improve at that stage you just have to rely on yourself.
    - galaxyLogic 5y ago
      There is so much software out there in a way it is not too different from biological systems. Programs are like creatures you can study and observe. There is no single book explaining all of software. You must be a bit of scientist yourself. Discover how thing work and what works best.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        That is what I'm saying, you can't teach that.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    At some point it becomes more like knowledge extraction and synthesis rather than being explicitly taught, because there are intangibles that your mentor can't directly teach you.
Barrin92 5y ago
+1 for a mentor. Everyone who has ever learned an instrument knows the value of a good personal teacher. Slightly odd personal recent example, a friend who is really good at speedrunning Super Mario 64 taught me for a few hours and I got better at it in an hour than I did in the three days before trying to learn on my own.
- buckwheatone 5y ago
  Finding a mentor isn't the easiest process, though. I'm a very motivated self-taught developer but there's a giant gap that could be filled by someone with more experience. It's frustrating when I post more nuanced questions on forums and get zero response. From what I gather, there are two approaches: (1) post in forums and develop a relationship over time (this can take forever), or (2) pay for an inorganic relationship through codementor or some other service and hope that it turns into a more organic mentor/mentee relationship over time. Neither is ideal.
- throwoutway 5y ago
  For me it was chess & weightlifting. A few hours with a mentor can help tremendously

LewisVerstappen 5y ago

> Partly offloading your learning problem onto an expert tutor trained in master learning has a good chance of vastly exceeding any learning approach a novice can adopt on their own. How have you implemented this in your own learnings?

popcube 5y ago
maybe some student read this article and forgot to learning from their teachers in university?

Jensson 5y ago

You need to balance having an expert and not having an expert around. Having an expert around to quickly learn the basics is great, but you will never reach the same level as that expert without learning how to learn on your own. This is the key difference between people at higher levels, there are no experts that can teach you there so it all depends on how good you are at self learning.

BarryMilo 5y ago
What do you mean "higher levels"? Is there some forbidden knowledge that must not be written down? Because if not, all levels have experts who can teach you.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  The experts exist, but can you get access to them?
- Jensson 5y ago
  There is a lot of knowledge you can't write down since you yourself don't know what it is, you just know how to apply it. For example, how do you structure your programs? You can write down some rules of thumb, but you can't write down your entire decision process as a flow chart that can be used on any program to structure every function in them. How to structure big programs is one of the biggest hurdles for new programmers, they just have to learn it themselves since nobody can teach them that. You can get a bit of feedback for simple program structures, but for more complex cases you wont even get good feedback, to continue to improve at that stage you just have to rely on yourself.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    There is so much software out there in a way it is not too different from biological systems. Programs are like creatures you can study and observe. There is no single book explaining all of software. You must be a bit of scientist yourself. Discover how thing work and what works best.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      That is what I'm saying, you can't teach that.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  At some point it becomes more like knowledge extraction and synthesis rather than being explicitly taught, because there are intangibles that your mentor can't directly teach you.

Barrin92 5y ago

+1 for a mentor. Everyone who has ever learned an instrument knows the value of a good personal teacher. Slightly odd personal recent example, a friend who is really good at speedrunning Super Mario 64 taught me for a few hours and I got better at it in an hour than I did in the three days before trying to learn on my own.

buckwheatone 5y ago
Finding a mentor isn't the easiest process, though. I'm a very motivated self-taught developer but there's a giant gap that could be filled by someone with more experience. It's frustrating when I post more nuanced questions on forums and get zero response. From what I gather, there are two approaches: (1) post in forums and develop a relationship over time (this can take forever), or (2) pay for an inorganic relationship through codementor or some other service and hope that it turns into a more organic mentor/mentee relationship over time. Neither is ideal.
throwoutway 5y ago
For me it was chess & weightlifting. A few hours with a mentor can help tremendously