End of Fall

It’s the end of the fall (and almost the end of the year) and I’m still looking. I’m actually fairly optimistic, though. I hope to have some nice projects up in time for the new year, I feel like I’ll have some good chances then.

I’ve been growing my skills a lot, it just takes a lot of time. At least for me, it’s difficult to learn by just blasting away at a complex project for a couple of weeks. I’ve been doing a lot of smaller bits of code, especially Project Euler, while also investigating some larger scale stuff. I’m going to write a program to help me manage the MGA ladder, because that’s a pretty big pain point (I hate repetitive data entry tasks!).

I think in terms of learning, I’ve gotten to a point where books will actually be useful to me now. I just had to do a lot of coding in whatever my way my brain wanted to, now I have a jumping off point for understanding more interesting stuff. So I’m going to go through LYAH again, and I’ve ordered the data processing cookbook by Shuklan.

I tried to use books before, but they felt too “boring,” which I guess was my brain’s code that I couldn’t internalize the information in a useful way. I’ve read some stuff that said that writing code is most important for beginners (even if it’s not “good code”), and then reading more code is more important later. I think I was prematurely optimizing a bit, thinking about how to make my code “good” and thinking about clean code. Even in Haskell, I can do quite a bit without understanding all the higher level concepts.

Social Learning

I’ve also started going through algorithms and data structure with a friend from the Go club. I think that it’s going to be super helpful. I forget if I mentioned it in a previous post, but I’m realizing that I’m a very social learner. While I do like to read, most of the integration comes from talking with others. And not just listening, it has to be interactive. I think that’s why it felt easy to learn Go and martial arts: lots of social feedback.

I’ve also noticed that online classes don’t really do it for me. It’s very difficult for me to sit passively through a lecture now. So, I won’t be doing a lot of online courses on my own, although I’ll probably pick up bits and pieces here and there, and I might go through exercises with a friend.

So, I’m going to apply this newfound knowledge! Less “trying to figure things out on my own,” more looking for like-minded people for all the things I want to learn: yoga, martial arts, Go, programming, languages. (I think that at this point in my life, I’m also just less embarassed about what I don’t know or can’t do).