toe knee

My learning is broken

There's a million ways to put content on the Internet. I've personally worked with React, Next.js, Django, Boostrap, vanilla HTML + CSS, and been scared off by Angular and Vue. Although these frameworks help people put stuff on the Internet quickly and easily, they don't help people understand the Internet. When a framework is working, it makes my life wayyy easier. When it breaks, it's harder to debug because I don't know how it works in the first place.

As a college CS student I could spin up a create-react-app but can't explain what a web browser does (displays HTML) or why (Tim BL and the World Wide Web). Unfortunately, my college CS education has tended towards preparing me to solve little problems -- debug my React code -- without understanding the big picture (wtf is electricty? how is a computer built? who profits from the digital age and why?).

Do it differently

So my goal with this blog is simply to understand concepts, and share my explanations as I go. It took me four years and an expensive college education to honestly ask myself: how do I really learn? It's not via Zoom lectures and textbooks, that's for sure. It's by doing, learning for understanding, and challenging myself for reasons other than a grade.

So, I will be sharing ideas and tutorials on this blog for my own learning and for anyone who visits.

Goals for my writing

An excellent teaching blog, BetterExplained, has a great philosophy on teaching new concepts:

Get a map, not directions. Memorization isn’t understanding: you follow the recipe, apply the formula, and get from A to B without knowing why. Directions “work”, but what about wrong turns? A new destination? Helping a friend who’s lost at point C, not A?

A Freecodecamp article agrees:

I’m a firm believer in understanding what you are doing. There was a time where I would follow guides, and have no clue on how to troubleshoot failures

I will be striving to make any concept I write about understandable to someone with little prior knowledge on the topic.

Shoutout to ncase and @omarish for inspiring me to actually write something.