To Beginners | Learners

Objective: Retaining the learnings

It is easy to spend (lose) time reading or watching content on any topic.
Unless used in practice, it is not so easy to remember any of it after a few months.
Most likely, you will only be practicing less than 5% of all that you have learned for the time span of your memory retention.

Target audience

Beginners | Confused learners | Seekers of organized learning

Method: Writing (or typing) own notes

Background

If you read/watch some content, practice it, watch the desired output rendered on your machine, you feel you have just learned something valuable. In most cases, the content is oversimplified to give you this exact feeling. Classic case of dopamine addiction! In-depth discussion on most core topics would make you run for other career choices if you are a beginner. At a later stage in your career, this same discussion is what would keep you interested in your work. Don't let the dopamine rush determine the success or failure of your endeavours. Track your efforts, not results!

Process

Think of your brain as a box to hold your learnings and your notes as a visual record of the same.
Every note which you add to this box has a value which you will be encashing throughout your career.
When you add something to this box, remember to ask yourself if you thoroughly understood it.
If you are not sure, or have not fully understood some part of your learnings but have sufficient information to move on to the next topics

• Add a TODO note against such piece of learning explaining what you are unclear about.
• Ensure that you narrow the scope of your learning objectives to account for the missing pieces.

Reason

• You get a chance to rethink about every single word
• Helps with
  • Improving your technical vocabulary
    • This is essential for others to understand and evaluate your technical expertise
  • Thoroughly grasp the content in its entirety
    • without skipping parts assumed to be non-essential at that given point of time

Benefits

Most developers feel lost in their early years because

• they don't know what to study
• how deep must they dive in their subject of choice
• they don't know if what they have done is the right way to do it

If you follow the above process of noting your learnings, you always have an opportunity to be sure about what you know, how much you know and be able to understand where the new contrary information fits in the larger scheme of things (I guess you will grasp the last part better at a later stage in your career).

Don't: Start teaching others when you are learning

Reason: There's more than plenty of incomplete, inaccurate and misleading content already out there. Let the documentation help others or go ahead and contribute to the documentation if you feel something can be improved. It would be a great service to others if there is a single source of information.