#programming resources

Here's how you memorize things:

Tell yourself you will do it. Don't try to find tricks or easy ways out of it, just sit down and do it

Write what you want to memorize on some index cards. Put one half of what you need to learn on one side, then another half on the other side

Every day for about 15-30 minutes, drill yourself on the index cards, trying to recall each one. Put any cards you don't get right into a different pile, just drill those cards until you get bored, then try the whole deck and see if you improve

Before you go to bed, drill just the cards you got wrong for about 5 minutes, then go to sleep.

There is no genius. No one works alone in a cave, and if they are they’re probably not working on the right thing or making something useful. Learn to lose the ego: be able to work and communicate with other people. Criticism is not evil; invite it early and often, especially from people more senior than you

Embrace failure:  fail fast, fail often, and change your approach. Don’t fail at the same thing repeatedly. Don’t hide the history. Document what happened and learn from it.

Be a small fish: aim to learn from more senior developers and people more experienced than you. Be open to influence from others. 

Codewars works through a ranking system. Each problem on Codewars is ranked from 8 Kyu (easy) to 1 Kyu (extremely hard). You have an overall skill level, starting at 8 Kyu and working your way up. You gain points and rank up by solving coding problems that other users created. Each problem has its own test suite that you must pass in order to win points. But if you look at the solutions without solving the problem, you forfeit any possibility of winning points off that problem.

The key to Codewars is that every solution gets voted on Reddit-style, which makes the very best solutions bubble up to the top. This allows you to solve the problem, then see the best way to solve the problem. This will usually teach you some new techniques or functions in the standard library.

So here’s what your workflow should look like: 

1. Find a problem, and try to solve it (repl.it is often your friend here). If you can’t solve it within 30 minutes, then just look at the solution. Whether you solve it or not, read the best solution and try to parse it. It will often be kind of mysterious and use methods that you don’t know. Go look up those methods in the documentation, play around with them, make sure you understand what they do and why the solution works. Make sure you get it.

2. This next step is essential. Now do the problem again and try to re-implement the ideal solution that you just read. Do it from memory. If you forget, go back and look at the solution, and then start over. DON’T SKIP THIS STEP FOR ANY PROBLEM, NO MATTER HOW SMALL.

If you do this, you will become a killer. I promise. I did it, and coming into my program I was way ahead of anyone in my mastery over Ruby. I also advocated this approach to my best friend, a former paramedic with no coding experience whatsoever. When the TAs read his coding test, they told me “your friend is a beast. No wonder, I guess.”

This method works for several reasons.

1) It ruthlessly trains you in the art of solving problems. If you want to get better at solving coding problems, the best way to do it is just solving lots of coding problems. Most of solving these problems is just pattern-recognition anyway, and it builds up a lot of exposure to many different problem patterns.

2) It teaches you tons of methods in the standard library, and makes you use them and grapple with them. This imprints them on your unconscious mind stronger than just reading docs or groping through tutorials.

3) By typing out the best solutions from memory, it’ll teach you by hand to write good code style and intelligent, concise techniques. Don’t underestimate the power of visceral learning. Just by typing out the code that someone else came up with, you’ll absorb the learning through your fingers.