Originally on this blog, I had a number of posts talking about my efforts to re-learn how to code. I used to love programming back in the day and it’s something I’ve often thought about revisiting. When I ported this blog over from my novelty domain the other day (more on this in another post), I realized that the quality of these posts was lacking a bit. I believe in the Feynman Learning Technique, and my posts on my coding journey didn’t reflect this, so they had to go. Because I’ve hidden these posts, I’d like to do a (brief?) recap of what brought me to this point, and what the future holds.
A few months ago, I decided to revisit a coding challenge known as #100DaysOfCode. I’d tried this before and made it to day 13 before I gave up. This time, things were going to be different – instead of tweeting my progress, I was going to write a full post each day. (I also lack a twitter (x?) account, so that was part of my logic). Each post was going to discuss what I’d learned, how I’d applied it, and what my next steps would be. In the beginning, my posts were comprehensive with code block samples. Seven days later, the code blocks were gone, and the article length had dropped to about a third of my original efforts. Writing 300-400 words about a single lesson just wasn’t working on a daily basis – I was spending much more time writing blog posts than I was coding.
In addition to wasting my time writing lengthy blog posts about my coding journey, I’d realized I’d spent way too much time investing my efforts in the wrong areas. My blog posts reflected this – they were just regurgitations of lessons in the course I was taking, even down to the code block samples. A good portion of this could be attributed to the pace and direction of the course itself – things weren’t necessarily moving in a direction I was comfortable with.
The course I was taking was a (slightly out of date, and free) introduction to PHP course. My logic was I’d re-learn PHP, as it was a language I was familiar with from a lifetime ago. Then, armed with my updated knowledge, I’d attempt to learn the Laravel framework. What I discovered is that not all free PHP courses are created equal and while this one was very nicely presented, I wasn’t learning concepts in the order I would have expected. A lot of advanced concepts were coming down the pipe early on without detailed explanations as to why they were being introduced at that time. The concept would then be revisited a few lessons later in a fleeting ‘remember back in lesson [x]?’. At that point, I decided rather than re-keying all of the code I was learning in my editor, I’d just finish watching the videos in this course and then move on to Laravel. It was at this point my regular blog-post schedule really started to wane.
Here’s where we can really begin to argue semantics about my self-driven #100DaysOfCode challenge. It could be solidly argued that if I subscribe to the Feynman Learning Technique, how is it that advanced PHP concepts were enough to make me fast-forward to the end of the course without putting in an effort to learn the concepts in-depth enough to teach them to others? Let’s just say I recognized this, and it’s a big part of the reason why I pulled my coding posts from the site. I’m not saying my coding posts won’t return – but when they do, they will be done in a manner that they can actually be used to learn a particular concept. If I can’t present a concept in this manner, it won’t be posted. Plain and simple.
So where does this leave my #100DaysOfCode challenge? Well, another reset I’m afraid. (I don’t see this as a failure – I still have the information I learned rattling around in my brain, so I’m not really resetting – just augmenting the process). Instead of writing a large blog post each day, I’m going to create a page on the site here. There’ll be an ordered list, and I’ll just post a short one or two-sentence blurb about what I did that day. Way less pressure, less time spent trying to explain a concept I don’t wholly understand, and more space here for rambly posts just like this one.
Cheers!
Photo by Miguel A Amutio
