I’ve always thought of myself as being a fast learner on the job. When you join a tour, or start a new job with new systems, you need to get up to speed fast. The show must go on, and it isn’t going to wait for you.
But learning when it’s a long road ahead can be hard. What is my goal? What benchmarks do I have? Here’s something that’s hard about it that surprised me:
Already knowing something.
Right now, I’m going though an online course that calls itself a bootcamp. It’s not a bootcamp, it’s a long video-based MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). You know the style, prerecorded lessons that try to cover everything. They promise to get you coding like a developer in 468 easy lessons.
I’ve been taking classes from freeCodeCamp, LinkedIn Learning, and some from udemy. I’ve dug into Harvard’s free CS50 course. I’ve done this before, and learned some things.
It turns out, that’s a problem.
This latest course started with a basic HTML module, and I understand basic HTML.
<p>, <i>, headings, no problem. Like I said, basic. So I kicked up the speed on the lesson to 1.5x. Let’s do this.
And then they mentioned a tag I had never seen: the <center> tag. The reason I’d never heard of <center> is that it isn’t the way things happen now. Centering content happens in the stylesheet. <center> was done away with in HTML 5.
What it showed to is how much and how little I know, and how much that impacts learning new skills.
It’s hard to stay engaged when you already know the things you are being taught. Sure, you could tune in and brush up, but engaged? That’s something else.
In this case, <center> is not a big deal. Knowing it or not won’t have any bearing on writing code.
Instead, it was a sign post. It told me I had gaps in my knowledge, and I don’t know where more are. When you are doing this on your own, it’s hard to find those gaps until they pop up without warning.
It’s the old “you don’t know what you don’t know” problem. So you have to pay attention to things you aren’t engaging with. It makes it feel like a slog.
It would be nice to tell a video lesson what you already know. Yes, I understand what a paragraph tag is. We can move on, thanks. The convenience of online learning is that it scales and is on demand. The downside is that nothing is tailored to your needs, and you don’t get credit for already knowing something.
There are other options, of course. A real coding bootcamp, if you can afford it. freeCodeCamp does a good job of breaking down lessons into small components, so you can move quickly though things you already understand. But in FCC, if you don’t get something, there isn’t much help there. You better go searching. That’s also a part of coding, so I guess you should get used to it.
For now, it’s just digging in, working at it, hacking away, and hoping I’m on the right track. More about that another time.
These months have so many frustrating moments. I am finding new ones all the time.