If you work or study in tech, I always feel a good getting-to-know-you question is “what courses or tutorials did you start, but not finish?”
My Udemy doesn’t look too bad:
The ZTM course was good, but I got stuck on an AI API exercise. I think it’s a common sticking point for students since Andrei includes a little rant about how it definitely does work - but I downloaded his repo with the solution and it was having the same errors I was and I gave up in frustration. I probably should have just skipped that one.
I started my first Udemy a few days ago. I was watching one of those “How I’d learn to code if I started over ” YouTubes, mainly because I’d like to know enough JavaScript to write little REST API’s on Node.js, but also because I’m starting to think web development makes more sense for a couple of the applications I’ve got on my (ever growing) list of app ideas.
A couple of times in conversations on Fireside Swift and Swift Over Coffee the presenters have talked about the danger of just doing more and more tutorials to learn programming, and the benefit, in contrast, of building your own real app. Although I am very much still benefiting from the 100DaysOfSwiftUI I have been seeing some of the upside of working on a real app in the last day and a half.
I usually have a few days of blog posts written in advance so I can schedule one to come out each day, and not sweat if I’m caught up in real life. There’s no real reason why I should have that strict publishing schedule, but it is part of my internal discipline to ensure that, at least on average I’m making some sort of report-able progress or effort each day.
This blog exists for a couple of reasons - firstly Paul Hudson insisted on posting progress in the 100 days of SwiftUI on social media, and secondly, when I try to explain something, I’m forced to understand it clearly - so I know this is a good learning technique.
Part of the @twostraws programmatic universe is his Swift learning app, Unwrap that I’ve included in my learning goals . It presents little snippets of learning with a 60 second video, and in a written version, then tests the user to check their understanding. It is slightly gamified - you get points for answers, but it’s not clear to me how that works beyond the satisfying haptics when your score runs up at the end of a section.
A couple of times (Protocols & Named Loops ) in the past few days I’ve needed to write and run a couple of tiny C or C++ snippets, and I’ve acutely felt the lack of Swift Playgrounds for it. It occurred to me that Playgrounds has been instrumental in my enjoyment of learning Swift - it’s just a bit magic to grab the closest device and noodle out an idea or to make sure I’ve understood a new concept.
In order to have something to put up on GitHub (as part of working all that out) I went back to re-write the Checkpoint 2 code that I’d written, but not saved, three or four days ago.
The task was to count the unique elements in an array. The teaching had been about the complex data types, so clearly the hint was to cast the array to a set. Although the idea of sets is new to me this year, I’ve come across them twice. Once in the 100 days course (the same day as having to write this code) and once from a few days earlier from a podcast episode . This is high quality learning - getting the same topic a couple of different ways a few days apart, then having to use the information for real.
