What I've Learned About Learning

raganwald:

I have a rather glaring life-long weakness, a behaviour that has tripped me up many times. You would think that I would have noticed it and corrected my behaviour in my teens or twenties, but no, it has persisted. While I am much better at correcting myself, it is extremely persistent and requires constant vigilance to suppress.

The behaviour in question is this: When I am learning something new, I suffer from laziness, impatience, and hubris. I try to grasp the gist of the thing, the conclusion, and then I stop. I figure I "understand" it, so I must be done learning.

This is wrong for me. I am blessed with a quick mind for certain subjects, so there are times when I am reading something, or someone is explaining something, and I can work out the obvious implications. Someone is telling me about aspect-oriented programming, and I start thinking about cross-cutting concerns like authorization. Or perhaps database access. Then I ask myself whether AOP is related to the "Unobtrusive Javascript" style. Or if it's really fine-grained dependency injection.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 8, 2012 2:41 AM
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