Learn to learn by learning something else, as a programmer

#beginners #productivity #watercooler #devjournal

Or, by relearning something you already knew.

I’ve recently picked up photography... again. And it’s amazing how much you can learn about learning when learning about something else. (Don’t worry, I will stop using alliterations now.)

Photography is a lot closer to programming than you might imagine

Without being too technical and flooding you with jargon, you have tools like the camera, lenses, editing software, the media where it’s displayed. And then you have the fundamentals: composition, color, light.

In programming, we have a plethora of programming languages, IDEs, where it will run. Then we have the basics: ifs, loops, variables.

The basics are important, the rest is creativity with a sprinkle of luck

Be it a camera or an IDE, editing software, or programming language, there are things it can do better or worse.

And today’s cameras and software are miles ahead of whatever they had 50 years back.

Your phone camera, with whatever default editing it has is already enough to make a masterpiece!
Same with programming, even with javascript alone you can do amazing things.

And even if you’re just starting out, you probably already know more about programming than people who started back then.

The only thing you’re lacking is experience, luck, and timing.

You probably understand why experience, and luck is self-explanatory, then you have timing... this one is hard and at the same time tightly coupled with luck.
Maybe a photo you took years ago could be a timeless masterpiece, but with a flood of photos everywhere... it’s just one more photo in the ocean.
Same with a side project that someone made and most didn’t even know about it until someone else did something similar and build a corporation out of it.

Learn by doing!

And if you don’t know where to start, or if you don’t know what your next project should be... start with something interesting.

For photography, take one style: black and white, color contrast, copy that movie feel, that glitch effect...
For programming, take one idea and go with it: IOT, mobile app, a clone of a page, or in my most recent case... I’m trying to make a calculator in base 10 (basically the way we do math in pen and paper.)

Try to make it and everything you need you will learn along the way.

And it might be just what you need to reignite or find a passion you didn’t know you had.

Cover photo by yours truly, it’s a photo I took a few years ago but with a recent edit. (it’s me in there BTW!)

And, if you have a good idea for the calculator name, let me know!
I’m doing it in javascript and I’m planning to release it in NPM... but I’m lacking a nice name for it.
Right now it’s Manual Calculation (also, feel free to check it out. I still haven’t wrapped it nicely and the division performance is abysmal, but the upside is that it is, or should be, as precise as it can be since it doesn’t make conversions to base 2).