Sharpening The Axe: Self-Teaching For Developers
summary
Clear, practical tactics for self-teaching: structured Coursera/edX courses (4–8 hours/week, set a schedule), small-group study with ~8 starters and 5–6 finishers, short weekly homework, puzzle sites like Project Euler and Rosalind (some people do 100 problems in a contest), books with exercises (SICP, Elements of Computing Systems), throwaway apps (recipe DB, Webrick HTTP-error tester, knitting-parser) and company hack weeks or timeboxed spikes; average learning time about 3–4 hours/week and concrete tips to make it stick.
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chapters (37)
- 0:00Start
- 2:45The Ferret Point
- 3:02Enabling The Ferret
- 3:52Lifelong Learning
- 4:25What to Learn
- 4:38Hard Stuff
- 5:17Thinky Stuff
- 5:53Scaffold
- 6:25Ways To Learn
- 6:38Massive Open Online Courses
- 7:57Tips
- 8:44Speed Up
- 9:55Study Groups
- 10:46Homework
- 12:36Celebrate!!
- 13:04Games & Puzzles
- 15:22Coding Challenge
- 16:05Prizes
- 16:36Books
- 17:41Exercises
- 18:06Short Chapters
- 19:09Prolog
- 21:39Throw Away Apps
- 23:25Not Finishing != Failure
- 23:44Learning @ Work
- 23:55Science Fair / Hack Week
- 25:22Prototyping
- 25:40Timebox
- 26:25Internal Apps
- 27:36Unit Tests
- 28:05Test Tools
- 28:42Load Testing
- 29:02Learning Time
- 29:27Own It
- 30:20Set A Goal
- 30:37Accountabilibuddy
- 31:47Accept Set Backs
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