How to Break up Studying vs Doing
I wanted to ask you how do you normally break up doing vs study when learning something new in software development.
In general I want to be better coder and learn to how better apply my learning and I wanted to make sure I'm not going down a rabbit hole when doing either and most importanly making sure I'm not stagnant.
Discussion
(2 comments)- 2
6 months agoEngineering Manager at MistplayRahul just posted an answer about how to best use tutorials where you start by following the tutorial exactly but WITHOUT using any copy paste. Then the next time doing it over but not relying on the doc as much, ultimately by the fifth time doing it by memory and adding something new. (A link would be great if someone has that.)
There are 2 ways you might feel stagnant off the top of my head:
- Endless reading without doing
- Doing things that you already know how to do without having read about something new and more exciting
There are various ways to proactively stop this like setting a timer for an hour to go back and forth. Or mornings for reading and afternoons for doing. This feels a little artificial and may not line up with what you want. An alternative approach is this:
In the last 15 minutes you have for work for the day write in a journal about what you how it went. Reflect on how much you read and how much you did (maybe 2 columns?). List out your wins too, like you completed the tutorial from memory, or you read an article about a pattern you are excited to try next.
On the weekend you can spend sometime reviewing your week to collect the biggest wins and retrospect on if you felt balanced in learning and doing or if you got stuck in rabbit holes.
This behavior itself will also be super valuable when starting your new job - the exact same journal will be full of work based wins to keep yourself on track, to share in bi-weekly 1:1s with your manager, and the big wins will be there for you to rock your first performance review.
You got this!
- 2
6 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroSimple answer: Just don't study.
Studying is for tests like interviews. It's not for general skill-building. If your goal is to become proficient with a tech stack, just start building. The process is quite straightforward (I was able to do this back in 2013 as a dumb college kid):
- Come up with a basic project idea as an anchor
- Decompose the idea into chunks
- Build it out bit-by-bit, using resources like ChatGPT/Google/StackOverflow to fill in the gaps
- Publish what you built
- Get feedback and continue iterating on it
Here's another good thread about this: "How do you allocate time for side projects and upskilling as a senior engineer?"
I like this one too: "How to avoid going down the rabbit holes when learning new things?"
