Learn, Do, Learn
Not a Medium member? No problem. Read for free here.
We’ve all been there. Weekends wasted going through tutorials while retaining little from the experience. Did you build that todo app along with the presenter? We read blogs and watch videos about Spark or React or Painting. We take courses, but when it is time to build something real, we are completely lost — starting from scratch. Why is that?
First, A Story Of Failure
Early in my career, I wanted to learn programming. I went from language to language, reading all the books and following all the tutorials. I remember reading a great book on C#. I went through about 75% of it, completing all the exercises along the way. When it came time to build something on my own, I was lost.
My first project implemented the A-star algorithm. Understanding the rules of this popular pathfinding method is easy. Anyone can understand the flow in minutes. When I started writing code, I found myself going back and re-reading entire chapters of the book I had already worked through. Virtually all that earlier time with the book had been wasted.
It took me about a month to figure it out and get a working implementation of the algorithm. After that, I took…
