The CodeWolf

The year is 2016. I was sitting in my advanced c++ language class back in my college and was pretty much confused as to what was going on. We were being taught c++ without actually coding anything. The emphasis was on learning the terminologies and excelling in exams through previously explained examples, which were outdated and not relevant to any industry.

I was fed up with this class and to be honest most of the lectures that I was attending in college. I walked out of the class and decided finally that I am not going to chase any marks. I went to the cafeteria and called my mom and told her that I might fail in the upcoming exams because I don’t think I want to learn just the theory. It was an awful conversation and was very difficult convincing my family that I would eventually do something, which mind you is an Indian middle-class family who expects a lot out of their son.

As expected I did fail. I could not mug up any theory and was more interested in the practical aspect of code. I wanted to explore what Open Source really meant and so in my summer school, which was just a glorified cram school for failures, I found my true calling.

I started a dramatics group in our college which I needed to promote to get cool gigs. One way to do that was an android app. Now believe me I had absolutely no knowledge of any android related thing. I basically just shot an arrow in the dark and came up with an idea that I needed to make an app. I started researching that summer on android and how I could credibly build an app in it. It was a very grueling self-learning journey and I had to completely dismiss the notion of how I spent my time learning earlier. I made a lot of failed projects. Some didn’t even start booting up. I had to learn java from scratch and also learn all that was relevant in creating a standalone app.

It took me a few weeks but I had successfully created my first android app and although it didn’t look that good, it did work!

The app was a hit! Although I had deviated from dramatics, I was getting positive responses on my app! More importantly, I had found out how I should learn things in college.

I decided to take an idea and keep building projects to learn any relevant technology. Within a few months, I was rocking data structures and got pretty proficient in java frameworks such as spring and android app development.

I also forayed into game development and got the basics of C# down all the while studying system design to optimize my app development process. Meanwhile, I had begun freelance work and had taken on some projects where I used to spend most of my time trying and testing a lot of different ways to achieve my goal.

During this time, I had completely shifted from a theoretical approach to learning to a practical one. I used to create working notes on everything being taught in lectures and then try to implement everything practically. Usually, the theories I could not test practically were the ones that skipped the locker of my mind.

The results were evident. From failing in coding subjects, I was now the top scorer. My overall grades also improved with me sometimes being the topper in a few subjects that leaned more into practicals, eventually making my university grades come to a respectable haul.

This remains as a case study for me years after completing my university education. A simple shift in approach to learning tech made sure that not only I excelled in studies but also expanded my horizon to include new unknown pieces of life skills in my arsenal. It helped me start earning and gaining confidence in my skills all the while making sure that I retained what I learned!

If we increase our deliberate practice over time, it definitely can benefit us in making sure that efforts of learning any tech become more fruitful.

I believe in the following aspects whenever I try to learn any tech:

1. Is the tech easy to prototype? : If the tech is easy for us to prototype and experiment with, then we should opt for quick references and prototyping the tech.
2. Does the tech have a lower barrier to approach? : Taking an example of frontend frameworks and libraries, Angular framework has a higher barrier to approach for beginners while React library has a pretty low barrier to approach. This means that once you start learning any tech, if its easier to implement for a beginner, the faster you can learn and practice it.
3. Complicated tech needs goal based learning:  As explained earlier, a framework such as Angular, which is more complex and defined, needs more time to approach. A good way to incorporate practical learning here is to set small achievable and practicable goals. This could be something as simple as learning how to create an Angular app, to something as complex as dependency Injection. Having goals in learning any tech makes the process rewarding and more engaging when learning.
4. Theory can not be skipped but managed: Theory of any tech can be present in several forms. Documentation, tutorials, community information and contributions, sample project info etc. are some of the forms of readily available theoretical material available. We are often dependent on these to approach any tech. The important thing to note here is that our reliance on theory should not fall completely on any one type of material. A good approach is to begin with quick to understand tutorials and then switching to documentation to understand some complicated aspects of it. As we become more confident, we must engage with community contributions and improve our understanding further.
5. Practice takes time, often more than learning theory: Approaching any tech practically means a lot of work. We need to set up an environment, create use cases and build projects to test our learning. This also involves diving into relevant theory based on our goals to learn the tech. So practice takes time. But the outcome would definitely be more retainable understanding of the tech we need to learn.

So in this blog, we underwent a case study on my own life and how this led to a transformative journey in my career, changing my approach to tech. I hope this helps you out as well in exploring a different way to accomplish all your learning goals.

Discover more in the next blog!!

I keep on coding something cool, visit ankush.tech to see what all I am doing!

If you wish to read about my work, here is a book that I published recently – “CSS Bullets, a comprehensive guide to all the CSS you need!“

Interested in React? Learn react from scratch with my book, “REACT Bullets“.

Thanks for sticking around!

Till next time, keep howling, hustling, and learning!