Tag: learning

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Building variations of the same app to practice or learn different tech / frameworks / libraries

Once you’re familiar with building a solution for a given problem, as you’re learning new languages, frameworks, libraries or whatever is your current focus, there’s no reason why you have to build something completely new when you’re learning something new. Learning to solve problems is valuable and essential, but if your current goal is to build some experience with a new framework for example, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t rebuild something you’re already familiar with.

For example, if you’ve come across any of my posts before, you’ll know I’ve been spending a huge amount of time writing code around solving and generating Sudoku puzzles. While this has been an interesting exercise in itself, the real goal was to use it as set of related problems for practicing building apps with React and AWS Lambdas.

Even for the frontend I’ve gone through a couple of variations:

The initial frontend app was React with Redux, and it’s served from a public S3 bucket here: http://react-sudoku-solver.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html . The source for this app is here: https://github.com/kevinhooke/sudoku-solver-react-app

I then redeployed it using a CloudFront distribution, with a Route53 record using my domain name, that’s here (it’s still the same app at this point) : http://sudoku-solver.kevinhooke.com/

Recently I rebuilt it using Redux instead of Flux. I don’t have that deployed anywhere yet, but the source for that app is here: https://github.com/kevinhooke/sudoku-solver-react-app-with-redux

I was planning on updating the app to download pre-generated puzzles. That part took me off on a wild goose chase, on working out how to generate puzzles and grade them with a human solver to assess their difficulty. Now I’ve got that part working, I can come back to the frontend app again.

This app, the frontend and the backed solver, generator and grader has kept me busy for month. You don’t have to build something new everytime, if you’re struggling for ideas for personal projects, it’s ok to rebuild something you’re already familiar with.

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Interactive online tutorials for JavaScript

The number of free (or low cost) online tutorials for developers to learn programming today is outstanding. Never before have learning resources been so easily accessible.

My favorite type of tutorial are the interactive style where you get to work on a solution to a problem online and the site checks your result and gives you feedback. Compared to a static tutorial where you just read materials or watch a video, this additional interactive step really helps to apply your understanding at a practical level.

(NOTE: list in progress – last updated 11/03/20)

These are some of my favorite interactive learning resources:

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The best way to learn anything new in software development is to try it out yourself

You can read books, watch YouTubes and listen to as many podcast as you like, but the best way to learn anything new in software development is to try it out for yourself. Why? Because you’ll learn far more from the hands-on experimentation with a new tech/library/api when you try to use it that can ever be transferred as knowledge and experience from a single book/video/article/podcast. What you can learn from a single 1 hour podcast can give you a high level overview of a topic, but you can never learn as much as you will from trying it our yourself.

Part of the learning experience is working out how to solve the problems you run into. The ‘huh, it never said that in the manual’ experience. Once you’ve worked through the unexpected issues along the way, you’ll have built a much deeper understanding of what it actually takes to use a new technology. It’s where the rubber meets the road that counts.

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Learning by doing

I’m often asked ‘how do I learn [insert something new here]?’, or ‘what approach do you use for learning something new?’. You can learn many ways, we all have different styles of learning so you should experiment to find out what works for you

In software development, learning by doing should never be ignored as a useful technique. It’s one thing to learn something at a high level by listening to a podcast, reading something online or in a book, but the next step if you really want to learn the ins and outs is to do it yourself.

Here’s an example of why this approach is valuable. You overhear a guy talking about how a machine is turned on: ‘to turn on the machine you press this button’. Some time later someone else asks you how to turn on the machines, and remembering the conversation earlier, ‘you press this button here’ – the other guy presses it, and nothing happens. Huh, what went wrong?

If you’d tried to turn on the machine yourself earlier you would have found out, probably by trial and error, that there’s a key and it needs to be turned to the ‘on’ position before you press the button. There’s no way you would have learned this just by the earlier conversation, but if you’d tried to turn on the machine yourself, if the key was in the ‘off’ position then the button wouldn’t have worked and so you would have started to investigate further, get the manual, or go and find the other guy and ask some questions.

This is rather contrived example to make a point, and how much detail you need or want to know about any given topic of course varies. However, in software development, I don’t think anyone would argue that you don’t learn to program by reading a book; you learn by doing, you learn by writing code. Go write some code, you might learn something.

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