It’s been twenty days since my post about learning angular and the progress has been slow but steady. I’ve studied pretty much every day, with the exceptions of the 11th and 18th, when, two Saturdays full of work when I just didn’t have time for anything else.
I’ve been watching all lessons of the course very slowly, making sure I understand everything and how it would be useful for the different apps I have in mind. It’s very easy to get bored when you aren’t understanding a subject, so usually I can measure my learning by the amount of boredom.
The course I’m doing goes through everything with so much detail that sometimes it can take 2 hours of classes just to implement a single functionality. Two hours in my case mean at least 10 hours of studying because I’m going back and forth in slow motion to understand everything.
I’m learning a lot about how to learn and one of the things I realised is very important is to create checklists. Often times the idea behind a functionality is fairly simple but it takes as many as 20 or 30 steps to implement it. And the time it takes to create a check-list will pay off saving a bunch of time in the feature when you’re lost trying to create your own app and don’t remember exactly where was what.
Plus these check-lists will be paramount to expedite the process of creating apps later on. In 2018 I read a book called Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, a very interesting read about how checklists improve processes in many areas such as aviation, medicine and construction. The point is, it doesn’t matter how good you are at you do, you just can’t memorise all the information you need to get the job done. And having checklists will free brainspace for the things that really matter: creativity, design, the big picture, problem solving, etc.
Checklists, for example, are part of the reason why commercial aviation is so safe. No pilot can memorise all procedures for all scenarios an aircraft my get exposed to. But they’re highly trained to use checklists for those scenarios. And these checklists keep being updated whenever new data arrives.
Now, speaking of my current journey in Angular, I just finished the sections related to display and navigation (the front-end stuff), and now I’m delving slowly into middleware tools, such as dealing with Forms and HTTP requests, which is very exciting, as I’m going to learn how to connect my websites to Firebase. I can’t wait to see how many possibilities it will open for the implementation of all ideas I have.