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Keep reinventing

Striking a balance between Clobbering and Learning

Getting stuck as an "Advanced Beginner" happens. Specially in cases when we use a new tool or language to deliver a product/project. I have noticed that I approach things with a narrow mindset, I would use the tool or language to deliver what is desired. It will have expected features but its implementation won't be ideal. The process of unlearning these habit is long and often times with a deadline I end up collecting tech debt. Recently I came across some links that talked about this phenomena:

Related Conversations on Internet

There was a big thread on HackerNews around better way to learn CSS(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23868355) and I found this comment relevant to my experience:

They always assume every one learned like them, by trying stuff out all of the time, until they got something working. Then they iterate from project to project, until they sorted out the bad ideas and kept the good ones. With that approach, learning CSS would probably have taken me 10 times as long.

Sure this doesn't teach you everything or makes you a pro in a week, but I always have the feeling people just cobble around for too long and should instead take at least a few days for a more structured learning approach.

Last statement of the comment struck a chord, cloberring has its limitation and it needs to be followed up with reading of fundamental concepts from a book, manual or docs.

Another post that was shared on HackerNews talks about Expert Beginner paradox: https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/

There’s nothing you can do to improve as long as you keep bowling like that. You’ve maxed out. If you want to get better, you’re going to have to learn to bowl properly. You need a different ball, a different style of throwing it, and you need to put your fingers in it like a big boy. And the worst part is that you’re going to get way worse before you get better, and it will be a good bit of time before you get back to and surpass your current average.

Practices that can help with the process of clobbering and learning:

  1. Tests: unittests gives code a structure. They set basic expectations on how the code should and should not behave. If we maintain a uniform expectation through out the code base, unittests helps maintain a certain uniformity and quality.
  2. Writing documentation: For me this is like rubber duck debugging. It gives an active feedback on what are the deliverable, supported features, limitations, and upcoming features.
  3. Pairing with colleagues over the concepts and implementation. Walking through the code and explaining it to colleagues helps me identify sections of code that make me uncomfortable. Where am I weak and where should I focus to improve.
  4. Though similar to pairing, Code Reviews have their own importance and value.

These practices won't replace the need of reading Docs or Book, but they would certainly give you good quality code and keep your tech debt in check.