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Comment by throwawaystress | Hacker News Reader

Whoa! You’re going to finish all seven (six?) of those books over the next month? Just on nights and weekends? How are you so productive? How do you not burn out, given that (I assume) you do software during the day? Honest question, from someone who is often down on themselves for being a slow coder, slow reader, and easily burned out.

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Then again, they're just plans. If announcing plans counted for anything, I'd be jacked with a six pack.

Definitely don't get down on yourself--going through periods of low- and high-productivity is normal. I get burned out at work multiple times each year (I do mostly technical writing, training, and support). It just depends on how you look at things and how you measure success. I'm not a 10x developer, so I don't measure myself against 10x tech bloggers or other "experts". I just break my learning goals down into small, manageable tasks and revise as needed.

My measure of success is being able to understand development at a lower-level. Learning new languages, frameworks and building side projects helps me through the low periods and enables me to work more fluently with developers.

I have experience with Javascript and VueJS from a couple of years ago, so my goal is to catch up with modern JS (ES6+), brush up my JS core knowledge (not just frameworks) and learn ReactJS. It's very likely that I won't finish everything on my list this month, due to other obligations, but that's ok. I'm not competing with the experts out there, I just want to learn new skills and build things that I couldn't before. I also have a bit more time now that I'm stuck at home on evenings and weekends.

Thanks :)

Maybe he's just brushing up his past knowledge. Or maybe he's got the photomemory ability like gifted people. Who knows

I'm beginning to think this kind of memory is hugely important for programming. It sounds counter-intuitive because devs work with text, but maintaining a visual representation of any project, current and future state, as well as the various machine states is a consistent way to be productive.

That's very helpful. But I'm talking about people with a special ability to remember everything after reading it once. My brother is someone like that and it's insane how much he remembers details of things that happened so many years ago.

Definitely the former--I'm just brushing up on my core JS skills and learning React for the first time. I currently use Vue for side projects, but I really like the React Hooks API.

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