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My learning method💡: what worked for me. ✍📖

Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫 on July 13, 2020

Hello, users! 👋 How are you doing? I wish you, friends, family and close ones are healthy and well. We've been through challenging times, but I...
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vaibhavkhulbe profile image
Vaibhav Khulbe

To anyone who's reading this, please follow these two, they're highly important along with other points:

  1. Create your (flexible) schedule. Be realistic. Don't pressure yourself.
  2. Take. Notes. Always.

Thanks for writing this! Tenga un buen día Desiré. 🤗

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Thank you for pointing that out, ¡nos leemos! 🤗

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wulymammoth profile image
David • Edited

The emphasis on notes is a crucial one!

To further extend that idea, it's important to consider what works to allow for recall easily. I've used a multitude of things:

  1. Evernote
  2. Apple Notes
  3. Notion (paid plan)
  4. Roam Research
  5. markdown in a local directory and GitHub

One of the challenges that I've found is finding what I need when I need and making sure related ideas show up when I need them to. For those of us that write code, standard note-taking apps just don't cut it (looking at you, Apple Notes) which has no syntax highlighting or code-fencing/formatting.

I've almost all technical notes in markdown pushed to a private GitHub repository which includes useful commands and even my own glossary for terms I've heard but just learned the definitions for. This is useful, because I have an alias in my shell to take me to that directory for this repo and I can pop open any text editor and perform updates and additions. This also allows me to do a find easily via Unix utilities, like grep or awk and the one I prefer, ripgrep. Joplin makes them easy to read or some command-line formatter like Glow instead of reading the unformatted markdown.

But as you may notice, the recall component isn't there -- doing the above requires that I still remember how and where I've organized notes and certainly doesn't give me hints to related topics/ideas that I've taken down in the past. It enforces a very flat and one-directional structure, but information is bi-directional. When idea A is connected to idea B (A -> B), idea B should also be connected to A (B -> A), For example, coffee is to wakefulness as wakefulness is to coffee. If I search for "coffee", please remind me about my notes on "wakefulness". If I search for "wakefulness", please remind me about my notes on "coffee". This led me to discover Roam Research which is an amalgamation of all the tools I've used combined under one application. So when I've my coffee notes open, I can hit a keyboard shortcut that pops open related topics and ideas in a side bar (so useful) without changing my page completely over to "wakefulness". It allows me to browse two things at once. My only gripe really is that it's still in its infancy, it's expensive, and I'm trusting my data/notes to a third party provider

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Really interesting David!

Thank you for your deep response, you're totally right. I'll update the article with some platforms to take notes where developers are comfortable. I'll also try Roam Research 😉, thanks! 🙌

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wulymammoth profile image
David • Edited

Just excited to share :)

I forgot to note that it has a graph representation such that you can visualize all connected ideas... for a particular topic

I recommend watching a couple of YouTube videos first. Perhaps this one: youtu.be/vxOffM_tVHI

I stopped paying for Notion and had to decide after a two week trial for Roam whether or not I wanted to keep it.

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ilhamday profile image
Ferry

That statement is really hit me so hard. My pace sometimes went rush after a couple of minutes, and anything I try to learn become fogy.

And here I have one problem with taking a note. If you are saying always take note when doing a course.

  1. What exactly you write? I mean, all of it is code (for my case, I learn python).
  2. And how you organized it(the note)?

Maybe that's for now, thanks in advance.

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Hello, thanks for reading and for your response!

When taking a course I usually write down pieces of code (creating snippets), in my notes; some problems I found and the solution for them; and basically I try to write a 'guide' of the course I'm taking because in case I forget something, watching every video over again would take so much time, but searching through my organized notes won't take that long.

I usually write everything, theory, code examples, explanation of what does every piece of code, that's it!

But everyone's notes are so, so different...

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ilhamday profile image
Ferry

Whoa, that is much work to do, to take note. I hope I can do that, coz to much note is overwhelming, and I like clean and simple notes. But yeah, the minus is some lack of information.

Need for improvement for my note-taking.
Would you mind to share a note in here? Screenshot maybe.

It's ok if you mind it. ☺️

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫 • Edited

Here you can see a Gif, and I'll add a little screenshot too (with my documentation in spanish!). Hope that helps 😊

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ilhamday profile image
Ferry

What a great answer. I really appreciate this!

Btw, I'll try to use Notion as you mention, as tools to upgrade my skill at note-taking.

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Anik Khan

This article is legit. Nowadays newcomers have a tendency to find a short cut and learn as many technology as imaginable.
Learning is a long process; taking notes, teaching others, building something as you've mentioned above are proven methods to solidify understanding.
Thanks for sharing it; it's great.😊

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

So glad you share my perspective!

I also find so sad that someone wants to get the knowledge right now, learning is an amazing journey where you discover a big part of yourself, losing that is losing a big chance... So I had the urge to write this.

Glad you found this interesting!

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akdeberg profile image
Anik Khan

That is so true- Learning is a journey of self-discovery.🤩
I previously tried to finish a tutorial as early as possible so to feel accomplished.
Earlier this year I realized how wrong I was!
Udemy Js instructor Andrew Mead at one of his courses started saying- "Learning isn't a race; take as much time you need. It's the consistency that matters". That line was a real puncher for me.
Anyway, I am still figuring out the note thing. I see you emphasized it real hard. Can you please refer me to anything that can help in this regard?

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Didn't know Andrew but I see we share same perspectives!

I updated the article in the notes part. I suggest you take a look to Notion, I use it for... Everything in my life, actually.
I don't know many resources that could enlighten you on how to take notes or similar, so I just suggest you create your own "guides" and "tutorials" for yourself while taking notes, as complete as possible. That worked for me.

Maybe the App Routinery would help you too, it helps building some routines and habits, it helped me too.

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akdeberg profile image
Anik Khan

That's a great help😀 Now I have a direction. Thanks for sharing the resources. I will expand on that.
Peace✌🏼

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Matheus de Campos

Awesome content for a new programmers!

When you say " Learning my self or Learning with a course "
Is the same for me, sometimes when I started to learning a framework, library or what else, I prefer do something by my self, and the next step I watch the videos, courses and tutorials.

This important thing is consuming about what you purpose to do!

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Really good perspective!

Indeed, I pointed it out because some people never watch videos/courses, and I think it's important to rely on them. Let's keep working hard! 💪

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Matheus de Campos

For me, it's very good, watch videos to see diferent ways to solve a kind of problem. It's part of the process. This method we can learning more.

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mmxm0 profile image
Marta Xavier

I think the most valuable thing you wrote was: "this is not a race; you'll get there when you can."
That's so true.
In my learning journey, sometimes I constantly feel lost in my own rush to learn faster and I end up abandon the path.
Thank you for sharing this text, it helped me.

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

I'm so glad it helped you Marta, since I found myself in the same situation many times with the feeling not only that I'm lost but that I'm not good at it.

At the end I just discovered I can learn the same as others, but just... Slowly. And that ain't a bad thing, it's just my thing. Hope you keep going on!

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Crawdon • Edited

Hi, first, thanks for sharing, you're the reason i started studing front-end dev.

Second when taking notes my advice is to try to explain as if you were explaining it to someone else, that way you realize if you really understood it.
This may not be for everyone but whoever it serves

Saludos👋

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Crawdon, thank you so much for your response and advice, I'm really glad you became interested in frontend development, hope my content can help you while in your path.

Indeed that's exactly how I write my notes: as if I were explaining the tech to someone that is completely clueless about it, that's a very nice perspective I totally forgot to add.

Thank you, ¡nos leemos! 👋😊

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Dana Ottaviani

Great post. How do you keep up with newer versions of tech you've already taught yourself? I try following newsletters but unfortunately they begin to take up space in my inbox if I don't have the time to read through them immediately.

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Hello, Dana! Thanks for your response.

For example I'm a Vue intermediate and Vue 3 (new version) is coming. I'll wait to read and try de official docs, when a new version of a tech you know is up, there's nothing else to do but start building new projects and taking notes about what's new!

It's a bit hard but tech won't stop for us, so we must keep going.

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Juan F Gonzalez

For everyone who is learning to code and wants to take notes in something more flexible, extensible and more dev oriented. Try Foam. Think Roam research meets Obsidian.

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George Gognadze

Good content. Just in case you're interested in programming resources:
github.com/georgegognadze/awesome-...
Good luck on your coding jurney!

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makampos profile image
Matheus de Campos

ohhh man, I like those resources. Thank you!

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atulcodex profile image
🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳

Nice post, I will surely use this methods 😅

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

So happy to read that! 🙌

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jeromegamez profile image
Jérôme Gamez

I really like that you titled your article as "what worked for me" instead of "what you should do" - this made me actually read it :)

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Everyone is different of course, there isn't any "magical method" out there, haha! Just wanted others to get some (possible?) inspiration.

Glad you got interested!

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Andrew Baisden

This article was a good read. Notion is life using GTD made me more productive for sure.

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genta profile image
Fabio Russo

I use SnippetsLab for my notes, and of course, Snippets.
Problem is, It's just for MacOs and I've no access to snippets also from mobile.

I will try Notion.

Thanks a lot.

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Wasim Malik

Nice article. For note taking my goto place is gitbook. It is free. Supports code highlighting.

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

Thank you, Wasim, and nice one! Didn't know it!

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helleworld_ profile image
Desiré 👩‍🎓👩‍🏫

You're totally right, mental and emotional health is always a difficult but necessary issue to cover, I'll think how to cover it correctly, thank you for your suggestion 🙏.

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developerbryan

Thanks for this. It's always interesting to see how others learn/use their time!