Do more, print less

I’ve come across many people who were always saying they were learning something but never accomplished anything. Always printing new tutorials, stashing them layer after layer in their tables, but never seemed to really get past transcribing a hello world in a new language. And a lot of trees were cut because of them and their paper heaps.

That “learning” method is wrong .

You can’t learn by simply reading in our developer world. If you are learning a new design pattern, you have to implement in a real scenario. If you are learning a new language, you have to have an accomplishable goal neither easy or hard, just something in between. If you are learning a new technology, you have to put it into practice and experiment with it.

Theory doesn’t work for most people, your coding brain isn’t made for that. You have to learn by being proactive, by  doing things . Copying an example doesn’t work. You can use them as a base, sure, but you can’t just copy it. You have to play with it, experiment, change, try, fail, try again, fail again, and finally get what you want working.

It was always this way with me: hitting a wall multiple times and then overcoming the obstacles. I can’t conceive any other way. And with all I’ve seen with the  printing tutorials a gogo guys, experience agrees with me.