3 ms·

Another way of thinking of it is that you are indexing. Perhaps you will come across something in the future which makes you recall that thing you read. This mi

Another way of thinking of it is that you are indexing. Perhaps you will come across something in the future which makes you recall that thing you read. This might give new significance to what you read and gives you a reference you can fall back on as needed. For me this happened with distributed transactions and sagas in Building Microservices by Sam Newman. He went into detail on these techniques and pretty much the only thing I retained was that they existed and what problem they solved. I didn’t remembered the other 95%. But I ran into a need for them and instead of having no idea what to do I thought: “I should learn more about distributed transactions, sagas, or other alternatives.”

rgrieselhuber 3y ago
This is exactly how I look at it as well. Our culture seems obsessed with “takeaways” when a lot of the time I might not discover the takeaway for some time, until I happen to encounter some other experience that made reading that previous book completely worth it. I guess it comes down to wanting a wide funnel of experiences to sort through or a narrow focus on whatever is going to help you achieve your objective. In reality, we probably need both but I sure wouldn’t trade some of the experiences and insights I’ve gained by having a wide funnel and not worrying about takeaways.