A mini note on learning
edition 8.
It’s October somehow. The sun sets earlier now. I’m constantly reminded I need to buy a coat. I still don’t own one despite having moved to the east coast 1.5 years ago. On the plus side, I’m not as worried about winter as I used to be. Maybe I’m no longer in denial about living in a place with seasons.
Here’s what the past few weeks looked like:
Fell sick and spent the better part of a week recovering
Spent a weekend in New York hanging out with my sister
Spent a weekend in Austin eating bbq and burgers
Taught myself html/css and git again
Went live with my lil personal website
Throughout those weeks, I spent most of my mornings and evenings teaching myself how to build a website. In this process, one thing I started doing again (and never should’ve stopped doing) is writing out everything I’m learning.
This is something I used to do during my software engineering internships in college and it was incredibly eye-opening. It helped me visualize the progress I was making and explain things to myself in a way that was intuitive to me. It also allowed me to find the gaps in my knowledge and work towards closing those as best as I could.
For example, while I was re-learning git, I found the doc I created when I was first learning it. This was helpful because I didn’t start from zero, but it was also evident where I had gaping holes in my understanding. It’s a much better document now, and because I spent time writing it all down, it’s ingrained in my memory.
Sometimes I think about sharing some of my learning docs with the world, in case there’s someone that can benefit from them. While I might not share them anytime soon, the fact that they may have an audience at some point pushes me to make them more structured and simpler to follow. This, in turn, makes them easier for me to reference from time to time.
In the same vein, I began to document my learnings during the 1-1s I have with my manager at work. I use most of that time to ask big-picture questions about the organization, and that information can tend to get lost unless I have notes to look back on.
reading: I finally completed Token Economy by Shermin Voshmgir!
I also finished re-reading Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. I’ve picked up Debt by David Graeber and hope to work my way through it for the next few weeks.
learning & making: akosuru.com
Re-learning html/css to build my website meant coding again after about 4 years. Honestly, I’ve been having the best time. I didn’t realize how much I missed building things, which is one of the aspects I really enjoyed about being a software engineer - the tangible output I get to create.
The website is very much still a work in progress. I want to add a couple more pages and as I stumble upon more brilliant personal websites (there’s so many out there), I’m bombarded with new ideas for content. All in all, creating a space on the internet that I can fill with literally whatever I want has been both overwhelming and refreshing at the same time. The possibilities are endless.
Recommended reading if you’re looking to build your own: