Checkins - #1
Books
Been thinking a lot about learning, deliberate practice, and learning how to learn. Particularly, I’ve been searching for ways to study and practice coding. While a school curriculum can give you some guidance in the sense of “first learn this, then learn that”, I don’t think we’ve pinned down the optimal process of teaching and learning how to program. Well, maybe MIT professors are the closest to that optimal process. Still, many questions remain. How to you practice coding? Do you go to Code Wars, HackerRank, and the like to level up your skills? Do you study and read books? Watch video courses? When you start thinking about it you realize there is no one straight forward path you can take. The best we’ve come up with, at least in the Web Development world, has been this. How do you even start?
I recently read two books that are starting to give me some ideas on how to structure my learning process. The first one is Ultralearning. The book is by Scott H Young who’s known for doing the MIT Challenge where he completed the 4-year MIT curriculum in 12 months. There’s a lot of actionable things I’m starting to apply to my studies. I highly recommend the book. His blog is also excellent.
The second book is A Mind for Numbers. The book has very similar principles to Ultralearning, but less focused on fast learning. It’s aimed at Math and Science students, but you can apply the lessons in the book to any discipline, specially Programming.
I also read Orielly’s newest edition of Learning React. This book is superb, and forward thinking.
Movies
Jojo Rabbit is a magnificent piece of cinema. Please give it all the awards. It’s an incredibly sweet and wonderful movie.
I always knew about Akira but for some reason never made the time to watch it. I wish someone would have pressured me into watching this sooner.
Projects
Speaking of React, I started a project I un-creatively named Channel. It’s an RSS reader, right now a super basic RSS reader, but I’m having lots of fun building it. I’m trying to add the typical features you see in apps like Feedly or NewNewsWire. There’s still a lot to do, but it’s currently in a decent working state. You can checkout the demo here.
Links
Programming for Advanced Beginners
System Ui Icons - So fresh and so clean.