Post

I'm not! Thanks for the share

i think people would be more willing to do this if they weren't forced to do simular stuff in school.

This learning process can work in other areas as well, not just coding.

There is something about fingers to brain. I remember I would write out anything I was going to present, often several times, and it seemed to stick better than just reading it. You have to do things to really get it.

already looks based 👀

This is good advice!

excited to read!!

Interesting, never heard of this way of learning before! I'ma need that link when the blog post drops

@svelte.dev tutorial also does something like this:

That's how I'm learning Godot. 1. Follow a tutorial. 2. Think of something that should be changed. 3. Make the similar game, trying not to refer back to the original, but it's there if (when) I get stuck

As a professional developer with 50 years of experience I heartily concur with Zed's sentiments

I love this framing.

Great

Can’t wait to read it! Sounds like a banger. 😎

Isn't this just how everyone learns already?

I also finished The Programmer’s Brain this week and I started grokking code much, much faster by using flash cards and trying to rewrite examples from memory. Turns out not saturating your working memory is extremely important!

This is also true of many other pursuits and vocations in life.

Interestingly, research shows that the production effect also improves comprehension, albeit not as much as the generation effect (unsurprisingly) So it's not as good to just mindlessly memorize and/or transcribe an example, but it's still better than just passively reading

I recently turned off inline autocompletion and noticed myself suddenly internalizing obscure APIs that I always struggled to remember!

This explains why my brain currently finds it harder to remember the keywords

i write the code in my head. then i type if from memory.

I think the same principle might apply to learning natural languages.

something pleasantly ironic about saying not to copy-paste code in a print version of this book

Ooooh, I'm pretty sure that line is what I was remembering. I'm going to use that excerpt, too, for my post

Back when learning programming in the 1980's, for the first year or two I first wrote my programs by hand on paper, simply because the access to terminals for beginners (mostly ADM3A) at the Helsinki University of Technology was limited (this eventually eased). Maybe it helped learning.

Always

My entire career in software I always took notes on paper - not just meetings but if I solved a gotcha that had stumped me I also wrote down how I solved it. The physical act of writing it helped my brain remember for the future. While I rarely had to refer to the notes they occasionally saved me.

looking forward to reading!

I'm not sure how you get through to stressed, poor and time-pressured 18yos that doing things the hard way is the only way to make it through, when it's so trivially easy to hit the 'do it for me' button, especially since they're cramming in gig jobs just to be able to eat.