3 reasons why you fail in new technologies

Larry Foobar — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 06:44:27 +0000

Developers write code, designers draw interfaces, architects plan buildings, engineers build things. All kinds of specialists do different kinds of things. But what action is common for them all?

This action is called Learning. Learning is an obligatory stage of every job you need to perform. But to actually learn things you need to learn how to learn.

Usually, to start our jobs we spend approx 10-18 years on learning things (school, college, master degree, etc). But in fact, this approach may mislead us in the future.

**Meet Peter. Peter is a back-end web developer.**

He writes code in Python and is good at Math and data structures. He likes exploring new technologies and wants to extend his development stack. Recently Peter started to show interest in Machine Learning (ML). He is captivated by some new popular projects that were built using ML. He definitely decides to start learning it. As his day-to-day job does not require ML, he comes up with an abstract idea of building some side-project.

Peter has a plan. It looks pretty good for him:

Download (or buy) a couple of top-rated books on the topic. Read them.
Register at Coursera/Udemy/Lynda/etc. Sign up for a course on the topic. Finish it. Get a certificate.
Watch a series of Youtube lectures on the topic. Full 160 hours.
Sketch up a ML project idea.
Develop a project on GitHub
Enjoy!

For Peter the expectation of achieving the goal to finish a ML project looks like this:

Nothing can go wrong, right?

Of course, not!
In real crucial life what Peter got looks like this:

Familiar, right?
But why it happened in such a way?

There are at least several reasons for it:

Peter is used to doing it like this.

From early childhood, he was always taught to do it this way by our school, university, relatives, and friends. Paradigm of "first long learning - only then doing" was given for him as the only possible.
Fear of new knowledge.

Plunging into all this new knowledge, Peter realizes how much he does not know yet and how long the learning path is gonna be. Understanding this does not motivate Peter at all.
Learning in advance does not work.

One can not absorb tons of new theory knowledge for several months and then just start using this in practice. Learning doesn't work like this. Knowledge requires consolidation and immediate application.

But, what Peter can do?

Cutting a long story short, Peter just needs to immediately start doing things without spending lot of time on learning. Both learning and doing processes should be divided into small pieces and combined into a whole process that will give Peter the desired result.
Peter needs to do the paradigm switch:

"*First Learning And Then Doing*" → "*Doing by Learning And Learning By Doing*":

Achieving "Doing By Learning And Learning By Doing" is not a simple thing by itself too. I've built several rules and concepts for this, and I'd like to share them with you in the next article.

4 non-technical books every developer should read

Larry Foobar — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 15:14:24 +0000

When programmers ask "What to read?", some very technical and programmer-only books are usually advised to be read. But what about non-technical, or maybe even fiction books? Such books, that can be fun and useful for programmers do exist.

Here, I offer my personal list of good non-tech books, that will affect a developer's formation and career.

 books[0] = {
   Title: '"Surely You\'re Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character',
   Author: "Ralph Leighton and Richard Feynman"
 }

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner, was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. It happened so, he was a brilliant storyteller as well. In autobiographic anecdotes he explains life from a scientist viewpoint. This is very funny, fascinating and even philosophic. 🤔

For me, as a full-time developer, these stories were enlightening and motivational. Reading about one of the greatest scientific careers gives you lot of food for thought.

 books[1] = {
   Title: "The Martian",
   Author: "Andy Weir"
 }

In fact, I'm not a huge fan of Sci-Fi. Usually for me it is too boring and over nerdish. But this novel is an exception. Andy Weir immerses his readers into a world, full of cool scientific things, explaining every tiny detail of it.

The novel's character is facing a problem, that seems to be unsolvable. But he does it. He splits it into a chunk of smaller problems and solve them one by one, demonstrating series of brilliant solutions. Reading this is captivating, and it made me draw analogies of how developers solve their problems. 👨‍💻

 books[2] = {
   Title: "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft",
   Author: "Stephen King"
 }

First part of the book is Stephen King's autobiographic story - his thorny path of becoming a successful writer. The second part of the book is King teaching others how to be good at craft of writing.

Throw stones at me, but I did a metal trick while reading this - I just treated programming as an art, and drew parallels and analogies with the writing art. As a result I enjoyed that reading very much.
Anyway, after reading this book, a developer can practice out the new writing skills in code comments 😉

 books[3] = {
   Title: "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind",
   Author: "Yuval Noah Harari"
 }

In the school I was so passionate about math and programming, that learning of liberal arts has been hard won for me. So, to get descent grades at History class I crank up a "corrupt" deal with my History teacher: I do solve all Math and Programming assignments for children of her class, she - gives me good grades 🤝

Later after school, I started showing interest in history, and this book was a real discovery. The book makes an extensive but brief excursion in human history. It is explanatory and easy-to-understand for nerds like me.

What non-technical books do you like the most? Share your experience please.

As you see all those strange Cyrillic letters on most of my books, you can cut me some slack on my English

DEV Community: Larry Foobar

3 reasons why you fail in new technologies

4 non-technical books every developer should read