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How do you learn best?

Josh Pullen on November 22, 2018

(Huge thanks to Raj Eiamworakul for the glorious cover image.) Hey folks! I want to let you in on a little secret: Right now, I'm working on bu...
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Christian Vasquez

I love making small projects whenever I want to add a new functionality in a particular project.

I'm the kind of person that is constantly closing unused tabs on my browser and I just like having a clean and more predictable codebase to play around before adding it into to the real project.

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Josh Pullen

Nice! So a sort of combo deal between small (demo) and large projects?

I'm curious which types of resources you find most useful in helping to learn something new.

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Christian Vasquez

I'm kind of a course addict, I was really into gaming and what mostly motivates me to keep playing a game are the achievements other than being "The Best" at it. So having websites like Udacity and Udemy with tons of courses with valuable information and seeing how each video/exercise would increase the progress bar keeps me going.

But this also can get out of control and find yourself in a endless loop of learning but not actually building stuff with what you learn, so you end up forgetting most of it.

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Josh Pullen

Personally, I find a lot of value in creating full-scale projects. The best way for me to learn is to dive right in. Unfortunately, this often results in a sense of aimlessness from time to time, where it's difficult to know what to learn in order to achieve my goals. Strting from a project-based approach can also leave strange gaps in knowledge or result in me taking strange approaches to solving problems because I don't know that a better solution is available.

In terms of format... The project-based approach means that most of my knowledge doesn't come from full-blown tutorials or courses, but from Stack Overflow answers, documentation, and posts like the ones right here on dev.to.

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Curran Kelleher

I'm curious, did you end up making the platform to teach web development?

I'm working on a platform to teach web development as well vizhub.com/

Maybe we could work together somehow.

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Josh Pullen

Vizhub looks awesome! My project is still very much a work-in-progress, but I did recently post an update on Twitter:

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Josh Pullen

As for working together: I think that would be awesome, and I'll get in contact as soon as it makes sense to do any sort of collaboration.

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Halldor Stefansson

I like to start with some small project, to learn the basics and find out if the topic interests me. (Reading or video)

If I find it interesting, I try to see what possibilities/functionalities are out there on the topic. Then I either build on the small project or start a little more significant project with some fun features.

I try to have projects that I (or others) can use or benefit from, so it's a motivation for me to finish them.

Example:
Begin by creating a static personal website.
Then maybe create a web app, where you can log in with Google/Facebook or have a payment function.