How to learn hard things in tech

IME the hard thing is not something that there's accessible examples for. If there's a tutorial or an example project, you'll figure it out eventually.

The thing that's hard is something like how to make a project maintainable. You have to have the experience of screwing it up over a long period of time, feeling the pain each time there's a bug to find or a new feature to implement. You won't find a tutorial in how to do this, because the pain is a necessity to learning.

>Start with the smallest working example —it doesn’t matter where this comes from, it could be a website, blog, the documentation for the technology, a friend or coworker, it could be from anywhere. This is your basic working example. It’s the baseline for building further knowledge.

This is the main idea behind over 400+ micro samples I created for ASP.NET Core https://github.com/dodyg/practical-aspnetcore

I can only second learning from documentation rather than using (video) tutorials or blog posts.

If you're strong in reading and gaining knowledge from documentation, you will generally be able to decrease your time to create working solutions. The reason is that you get faster in finding the information you need and become independent of the availability of explanations by other developers.

I'd only consult other explanations if the documentation is poorly written or my way of using the software is uncommon and I'm looking for opinions or alternative solutions.

I am also self-taught and mostly learn by the same process described in the article. Playing around with small, isolated experiments and observing the behaviour of the system is essential to how I understand new things.

But I would like to add that getting a high-level overview also helps me to gain a clearer and better integrated, more contextual understanding. This is especially important when I learn “hard” things (although this is a very relative term), since usually those things have a lot of unknown unknowns that often reveal themselves in this process.

That is why I like watching talks about the subject, reading articles and opinions, etc. which are more related to the conceptual stuff and the thought processes behind it. Usually I will then build a concept map and connect things I know that relate to the subject (I like using a PKM tool like TheBrain for this).

Love the link to https://slowlearnerclub.com/. I'm definitely in the club.

My hard thing right now is how to layout a modern project in terms of folder structure, how big should files be, where to put things. Separating gui from app, nice clean architecture.

I’m enamoured by the concept of functional core imperative shell but I’m struggling to see how to refactor my own projects to be like that.

(In python if it matters)

Would love screencasts, books, blogposts, other resources that cover this kind of intermediate “working on the code” not working “in the code”

When I encounter something new and hard I try to find a conference presentation around this topic. I'm guessing public speaking in a time constrained format really forces speakers to prepare well and provides the best time/information balance. Even better if there are questions from the audience that dig deeper into the why questions.

I'm trying to learn category theory. It's not the kind of thing you can learn the way this article suggests. I find learning new abstractions rather difficult especially at the level of category theory. If anyone has any tips I'd love to hear them.

The problem I find is that there are two kinds of hard things in tech, things that are actually hard, and things that people make hard, and you have to figure out which is which.

I second that, a super quick overview I find useful. The Fireship YouTube videos which explain things in”100 seconds” are great

A few times when I was working with a new technology in a project, I've found it extremely useful to set it up in a completely clean project, learn everything and proceed from there. I have seen people who tried to read the docs and jump straight into implementing stuff in the existing code base struggle with the basics.

Is anyone learning by not doing a variation of this?