Become a Better Engineer with Spaced Repetition

Improving Experience by Improving Memory

A few years ago I thought about what makes a person a good engineer?
Think about it, it's interesting to question.
Your main answer will probably be experience or maybe motivation.
Motivation is an interesting topic, but today I will focus on the experience.

If a good engineer must have a good experience, how can we boost our experience?

Can we improve the experience?

Think about all the problems/solutions/challenges/subjects/bugs that you faced with in the past, how much of this experience is lost during the years, and more important how can we save those experiences? Insert those experiences into the long-term memory.

Think about an interesting article that you read during the implementation of an arbitrary issue that you had. The chances are that few years from this moment you won't know that this article even exists!

I met an engineer called X (Not the real name) with perfect memory.
Everything he sees hears, and do will be remembered for a long long long time. From my point of view, it's experience worth a lot.
He was the best engineer I saw.

What can make us act like X?

As a person that read a few memory books, I found it very hard using the traditional memory tricks with coding or software subjects.

What doctor will do?

Medicine is my ideal test case! Those doctors must remember their experiences, or someone will die.
So I wondered which technique I can use for improving my experience.

After a while, I found on Youtube a few videos of MD students that use a technique called Spaced Repetition. They use this technique for remembering subjects they studied for a long time.

This method is very simple, They summarize complex subjects with few simple points, and test themselves about those points once a while, depend on how well they remember the subject.

Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards.
Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect.

Researches showed that everyone has a forgetting curve which means everybody will forget subjects that they read on someday.
Using Recalling we can reset the forgetting curve and have those memories for more time.

Intuitive Example

Let's say you read about a subject. If you will remind yourself of the key points of this subject in the week, two weeks, month, 2 months, 4 months - Trust me you'll remember this topic for a long time compared to the scenario that not contains many repetitions.
The things we remember the best are the things we saw frequently.
Researches found that recalled subject will remain in your memory for significantly more time.


This graph describes the process at a high level.

Recall is the process of reminding ourselves of a subject. With Recall we can move things from short-term memory to long-term memory easily, all you gotta do is re-read stuff!

Re-reading can be very exhausting. Personally, I hate read something again.

Spaced Repetition with Remnote

So we understand that re-read stuff is not feasible, so I search for a platform that can help me perform the Recall process and store all the knowledge that I want to store without reading again my points.
I'm using in the last year a tool called Remnote for:

• Breaking down complex topics into simple intuitive bullets.
• Recall those bullets with Spaced Repetition. After you broke the complex subject into key points, you can define which points will be recalled on the future. Those points will transform to Flashcards!

Flashcards Queue

Remnote have a Flashcards Queue with all the flashcards that you stored.
When you enter the queue Remnote will show you the points you summarized.
Part of the text will be invisible (it depends on how you defined your REM, won't be discussed in this article).
After you recalled the question/text you will specify how well you remembered this subject.

Here you can see a question about Django framework.
After I revealed the answer Remnote will ask me how good I was remembering that answer.
According to my feedback, it will ask me the same questions with the new compatible interval.


As you see it is possible to insert Code, Images, and more media types into a flashcard.

Real Life Scenario

• Reading about new Python feature.
• Deciding to remember this feature.
• Summarize with few points the feature in Remnote.
• Remnote will remind me of the subject once in a while ("Magic Intervals") when practicing Queue.

Self Discipline

Remnote requires self-discipline. Effective usage will require getting into Remnote queue every day and practice few flashcards (as much as you can).

Make this task a habit.
I for example enter each day in the morning for 20 cards.
The intervals that Remnote will remind you subjects depend on your answers in the flashcards, if it is difficult for you remembering a complex subject the flashcard will appear more frequently if it is easy to remember will be appeared less frequently - as I called the "Magic Interval".
It's important to say that there are many types of Spaced Repetition algorithms that support different intervals approaches.

Knowledge DB

Think about it, it's crazy! You have documentation of all the interesting stuff you read on. It's power and I'm sure it will help you in the future.

Summary

This article mentioned very few features that Remnote has. Please read more on Remnote homepage and watch Youtube videos of this concept.

For me, it helped a lot making my experience more valuable.
Today, I summarize every interesting subject that I met.
Read more about this concept, it will help you.