Why this blog
TL;DR: I need it because I can't use cheatsheets. At least not immediately.
It’s How I learn
Ever since I was a student, I’ve noticed a pattern in the ways I learn stuff.
In school, it was a very common practice among the students to cheat on exams by creating a cheatsheet with the most important parts. The more resourceful you were on how to create it, and how it would work so that you wouldn’t get caught, the better your chances for a perfect score in that exam. So at some point I didn’t have time to properly prepare for a certain exam (I probably did but spent it on something entirely irrelevant at the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) so I decided I would cheat.
Extracting the most important parts of the study material, I started taking notes trying to condense as much information I could in a piece of paper. It was a masterpiece and I was very proud of it! But when the time to take the exam came, I finished first and got the highest score as well, and that, without a single look into the cheatsheet.
As it turned out, while I was making that cheatsheet I also memorised everything in my mind, so that cheatsheet was no longer needed for me. This happend way more times than it should before I realised that writing anything down in my own words, is all I need to undrestand and memorise it. The same happend for the next few attempts and I kept ending up giving the cheatsheet to someone else who used it for what it was made for.
At least it was helpful to someone else at the time.
Later I used this realisation to study faster and more efficiently since I now knew my brain’s prefered way of learning: writing!
The job of a software engineer requires constant learning, and so I decided I would start documenting my thoughts, notes, and experiences with software and tech in general, so that I can keep up with my learing ambitions and possibly help others that might share the same struggles as me.