JD

On a mission to acquire wizard powers

[JD @jdmurenguko]

@nijfranck 😭😭

[JD @jdmurenguko]

This summer...

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

# on shortification of "learning"

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.

Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.

So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.

[JD @jdmurenguko]

Disclaimer: the drawing is not mine. I'm sharing it as a glimpse into what I typically tend to sketch when I encounter a new concept/subject to get a higher level understanding of the concepts- here, the flow - before making ramifications, i.e, diving deeper.

[JD @jdmurenguko]

I spent this weekend implementing security (authentication and defining the basis of what is to become role-based authorization). Having had a course on cryptography recently, it made me appreciate the level of abstraction FastAPI's security tooling offers.

[JD @jdmurenguko]

On the other hand, I experienced less the "black box" part of learning such concepts, having previously struggled with algorithms, their respective tradeoffs, and the role of the secret key. Having now learnt about asymmetric and symmetric encryption, it makes much more sense :)

[JD @jdmurenguko]

If you read until the end, well, thank you :)
If you want to read more about the projects and the technologies (and the design and the choices around it), I will be sharing a link soon to a detailed blog post.

Also, feel free to dm me if you want to talk.

[JD @jdmurenguko]

As of today, I have 1+ year of experience in web development, although the technologies varied depending on the needs of the company/team I was working with. Below are brief descriptions of the major projects I have worked on 👇

[JD @jdmurenguko]

The stack used is fairly similar to the first one (except for the technologies that wouldn't be relevant, obviously) although we did go with Postgres instead of Firebase to the ACID properties we knew would come in handy for the transactions we would deal with.

[JD @jdmurenguko]

My next steps is to search to acquire depth and breadth in backend engineering (not just programming). To that end, I have completely switched my learning style to a coding-agent-free, project-based one.

[JD @jdmurenguko]

Hello world !
I have decided to try sharing my work to the rest of the world as a way of:
a. documenting my learning journey and
b. exposing myself (and my work) to some kind of feedback

[JD @jdmurenguko]

As a brief introduction, I have been working as a full-stack programmer- although I tend to prefer backend, working mainly with Svelte and FastAPI. I have been exposed to a variety of technologies (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Firebase for the databases, ElasticSearch,Qdrant,...).