It has been almost a year of coding for me. I know that I have been bad about blogging the whole time through it. Honestly, sometimes I have questioned the value of it. I would rather move on to the next problem, after being stuck on it for an hour than write about it. However, I see the value that it continues to provide.

Nonetheless, I have been reflecting on and talking to people recently about the way that I have gone through the learning process.

I feel that the best way to learn something is to jump into it and begin hearing how people talk and communicate about the thing that you are trying to get into. I think that this comes from the way that I approached learning a new genre as a musician. I read some material from a great bassist, Victor Wooten, where he talked about genres of music being like a dialect. Most of us know that if we want to learn the way to speak a language authentically, it is to be around it…to constantly be hearing it. We even can see that when we aren’t trying to actively learn, but are living in a place with a strong accent, it begins to creep into our speech patterns. Similarly, we could learn a genre of music by listening and becoming familiar with the “dialect.”

The way that I try to learn comes out of this way of thinking.

When I first started learning, I subscribed to as many coding podcasts as I could. I tried to find the popular blogs to pay attention to as well as some places to find screencasts and join several meetups in the area.

My goal was to place myself in the language, terminologies, and concepts of the new field that I am trying to be in. There are often things that I heard and read that I did not understand. I tried to grasp what I could and bookmark and categorize the resources that I came across.

I believe that inundating myself in this manner, has allowed me to learn more quickly and grasp some of the “dialect” of the path that I have chosen. I plan on blogging on some of my preferred methods of learning in the next couple posts.