Learning Can Be... Boring?
Ran into a friend today at church and he asked me “hey I’m trying to learn Python, do you have any good sites or books to recommend? I’m kinda… bored.”
Now some of us geeks can’t imagine being bored learning something new, but I went through this when I first started learning Go. I had decided I wanted to learn a new programming language, and Rust was way too… Rust, so I picked Go and started building a small o-nothing web app. I got part way in an realized that I had no interest in what I was doing, and it (and some bits of Go that hadn’t matured) was killing my fun. So I put it down.
Fast forward to this year. I was ready to pick up Go again, but this time I also knew that I wanted to start writing again, and that the friction in my blogging process was killing my joy there, too. So I decided to write my own blog software (see #goldfrog), and I was going to write it in Go.
Suddenly I was energized to learn, because I had all these feature ideas for the site, and I had to learn the #golang techniques for tasks I’d only one in #python before. Also, it got me into the golang newbies Slack, and connecting with a community - for me at least - helps.
So my advice to my friend was:
- Find a project you’re passionate about, or at least really interested in
- Be willing to re-learn things you think you already know
- Find a #community!