To "study" you will have to use some sort of (often natural, implicit, unplanned) spaced repetition. But you will also process the information with an eye to make it productive (as opposed to "just stored").
I know that flashcards were a big thing among students when I was in grade school and college (decades ago). I'm sure they helped students memorize pieces of information, but I'm not sure they helped students understand them.
This would also enable flashcard/SRS workflows to interoperate seamlessly with other memorization techniques, like memory palaces or mind maps. Foreign language vocabulary is the rare example of a domain that doesn't need these things, so flashcards are perceived as "good enough" for it.
On the one hand, I've downloaded AnkiDroid and played with it a bit. But I have the impression that just "seeing" the card isn't helping me. I need to be forced to write down the answer.
On the other hand, I've struggled to understand what "kind" of things should go in to a card. For example, verbs: I'm learning a language that has a complex verb conjugation structure. What I really need is to study the conjugation table. But instead the usual cards I download just ask the infinive form, and then display the conjugation table in the back - I'm not going to sit down and study the conjugation table when I'm swiping cards. When I sit down and study I do without cards, so I don't see the benefit...?
I feel I'm missing the trick.
See the Cloze Deletion section: https://docs.ankiweb.net/editing.html
2. Try to make the cards into real-world examples. For instance, don't add the conjugation table, create example sentences for each of the conjugations and make each one a card. For foreign languages, I try to add audio to my flashcards, too.
3. Always make your own cards. Downloading premade decks never works and you miss part of the learning process.
4. For things that don't necessarily lend themselves to being on a flashcard, don't just write the information. Try to frame it in terms of a question and/or in a form that mimics the context in which you'd use the information.
For example, let's say you want to memorize the periodic table. Don't just write:
Carbon - Atomic Number: 6, Chemical Symbol: C, etc.
Instead, create cards with questions like:
What is the sixth element on the periodic table?, Is carbon before or after nitrogen?, What element has the chemical symbol C? and so on.
The more "viewpoints" you have of the topic, the better. I've found this to be a solid approach for virtually any topic.
> To create a cloze deletion note, select the Cloze note type, and type some text into the "Text" field. Then drag the mouse over the text you want to hide to select it, and click the [… ]
Select the Cloze note type, where exactly? I've searched both AnkiDroid and AnkiWeb (I was thinking that maybe I could creat cards from my computer and use them on my phone) and I can't find any button to make a note a "Cloze note".
Here is a video that walks you through it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d__MjidDz8c
When you create a card, it should say Card Type or Type at the top. By default, this is on Basic. Click it and you can switch to Cloze. Then highlight the text and click the [...] icon in the toolbar.
In my experience it works just fine. For example, using a geography deck to learn the location, flag, capital city, etc. of every country in the world. It also worked well when I taught my kids the multiplication table, the NATO phonetic alphabet, and so on.
OpenSource and Libre!
Especially with regards to solution architecture, you're often combining or comparing a huge (think factorial!) mix of tools, code, data, etc. Each with their own configurations, settings, gotchas, patterns, constraints, capabilities, hacks ...
Being able to quickly recall and locate URLs, code repos, docs, points of contact in a company or the wider community ... for me, it is the ultimate career moat.
This article on A Cloud Guru kind of encapsulates the sentiment well
https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/the-career-changing-...
Anyway, convenient texhnology for spaced repetition plus a second brain is amazing compared to earlier centuries.
In the future this will probably be a core part of OP's question .. adding things to the brain, automatically deriving connections, surfacing things into your "local" memory at the perfect time ...
* programming things that I use rarely enough that I don't memorize them simply from usage, but often enough that there is a time saving from having to DDG what's the exact way to do something.
* a couple personal information items like my credit card number (I don't like having it saved anywhere), my wife's phone number, my businesses registration number, etc
* moves for solving Rubik cube
* Bible verses