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Vic Shóstak
Vic Shóstak

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🥑 Get on an “information diet“ to be even more effective developer!

Introduction

2020 💥 People on the Internet create so much content every day that it's not possible to use it even in the next 100 years...

Did you feel when you read an article and/or watched a video from your favorite social feed and your brain was getting too much, but your memory didn’t save any of this?

In other words, you literally can’t even say "what this content was about?" and "why did you completely «eat it» now?".

Yes, that's first bell to "informational obesity". The information received didn't bring anything useful, you just spent time and filled your brain with extra ballast.

Today we will deal with it! 😎

Diet, not a complete rejection of information!

These rules will help you separate useful information from harmful. Before you start reading a new article or watching a video or listening a podcast, try to follow these sequence:

1 → Ask stop questions

✅ Why I need this now?
✅ How it helps me now?

2 → Understand author motivation

✅ Is this content is just Ad without any other motivation?

3 → Search for helpers

✅ TL;DR or Introduction section (text content);
✅ Time code for jump to needed section (video/audio content);
✅ Code snippets or links to repository (code content);
✅ Quick preview for all pictures (graphical content);

workout

What if a newbie friend asks for advice (some recent real life example)?

Quick answer is: apply rules above not only for yourself, but also for the people around you and do not feed them harmful to their brain!

❗️ And I tell you full example, because it's important to understand.

A few days ago, my friend asked me:

I want to learn HTML, CSS and JS for build my first website [...] before I start googling, maybe you give me good point where to start?

And it's serious question, because this topics are very common on the Internet and have huge dose of harmful information.

Almost every second wants to talk about their knowledge and sell their courses... unfortunately, not always of good quality and revealing the topiс! 🤷‍♂️

Realizing this (and because my friend is not indifferent to me), I advised him to start from the very beginning — read W3C Standards and do small exercises with learned material.

Next, gradually increase the sources of information:

  1. Eric A. Meyer's Grid Layout in CSS book;
  2. Lea Verou's CSS Secrets book;
  3. Heydon Pickering's Inclusive Components blog;
  4. JS Community's The Modern JavaScript Tutorial;

And so on and so forth... I immediately put my friend on an informational diet with extremely delicious mind food! 🥑

Final words

🎁 While you're hungry — you're able to learn information without achieving informational obesity! Remember it.

Photos by

[Title] NordWood Themes https://unsplash.com/photos/nqPe1juwcdQ
[1] Annie Spratt https://unsplash.com/photos/XMpXzzWrJ6g

P.S.

If you want more articles (like this) on this blog, then post a comment below and subscribe to me. Thanks! 😻

And of course, you can help me make developers' lives even better! Just connect to one of my projects as a contributor. It's easy!

My projects that need your help (and stars) 👇

  • 🔥 gowebly: A next-generation CLI tool for easily build amazing web applications with Go on the backend, using htmx & hyperscript and the most popular atomic/utility-first CSS frameworks on the frontend.
  • create-go-app: Create a new production-ready project with Go backend, frontend and deploy automation by running one CLI command.
  • 🏃 yatr: Yet Another Task Runner allows you to organize and automate your routine operations that you normally do in Makefile (or else) for each project.
  • 📚 gosl: The Go Snippet Library provides snippets collection for working with routine operations in your Go programs with a super user-friendly API and the most efficient performance.
  • 🏄‍♂️ csv2api: The parser reads the CSV file with the raw data, filters the records, identifies fields to be changed, and sends a request to update the data to the specified endpoint of your REST API.
  • 🚴 json2csv: The parser can read given folder with JSON files, filtering and qualifying input data with intent & stop words dictionaries and save results to CSV files by given chunk size.

Top comments (1)

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ben_schoeffmann profile image
Benedikt Schöffmann

Nicely put !