Effective Learning

Notes when people ask me how to learn more effectively

Intro

A lot of people ask me how to be more effective when learning. So I thought of writing some thoughts down here. I guess mainly to my younger self.

Read the error message

When you get an error, read the error message. A lot of the times, just reading and understanding the error message is enough to fix the issue. Plus often you learn new things how the library/framework works under the hood. Very easy to miss.

Read a lot of documentation with AI

When learning a new library or framework, read the documentation. Read it carefully. Copy paste the entire text into AI. Talk with AI about it if you've any questions. Play around with the code examples they have there.

From experience, spending time upfront reading a lot of the documentation is a cheat code to shipping faster. You automatically avoid running into common issues that other people will typically run into.

This is what I’ve done myself when working with e.g.

• Tldraw SDK

• React Flow

• Convex

• …

Follow your curiosity

If something interests you, follow your curiosity. It's fun. It's a great way to learn. When things are fun, you're more invested.

At the moment, I’m building a silly multiplayer game. It’s a racing game. Mainly because I wanna play it myself with friends.

Learn different things

Learn a lot of different things. Don't just focus on a single thing. When you learn a lot of different things, learning new things become easier because you've consistently put yourself in the position where you need to start from the beginning with zero knowledge.

What I’ve done for example early in my career is to build side projects with different libraries or frameworks. It’s not to become an expert I’d say, but to gain breadth.

Build from scratch

To achieve mastery, I really recommend building things from scratch. I've built things from scratch such as React itself. You learn how things really work.

I recommend giving a shot yourself, thinking from the outside, with the DX how you would build something from scratch.

You will fail a lot. It's fine. I've tried rebuilding React from scratch 4 times actually lol. I recommend giving it a shot and struggling a lot before you dig into the open source code and learn the actual implementation.

Build a lot of fucking things

Build. Build. Build. Tie things together. Ship. Get stuff working. Show some cool demos in public.

Ask a lot of questions

This doesn't just refer to work. Ask questions everywhere. In communities, colleagues, on hackernews, reddit, etc.

Never let your known unknowns grow. Eliminate them asap. Make sure to ask a lot, no matter where you are, and learn from range of people.

Teach others

To teach is to learn twice. I've said this before. Make sure to write blog posts. They serve as good reflection + helps you detect gaps in your knowledge since you've to thoroughly explain things.

What I currently do for the most part

• Build a lot of things.

• Write blog posts time to time.

• Read a lot of documentation.

• Learn/build different things -> solve different kinds of problems -> expand your knowledge exponentially.