There have been many things in my career that I have tried to learn, but there have been many more that I haven't learned. Part of those is because the computing landscape changed. At school I learned the Pascal language. I got reasonably good at it but over time those skills faded. Right now there's very little need for being a proficient Pascal programmer so continuing to develop my Pascal skills would be purely for my own enjoyment. I find other things enjoyable so those skills lay dormant. Should Pascal arise from its moribund state I can revisit the decision. But for now I'm content that I've made the right call. Later in my career the Java language came to prominence. I spent many sessions learning Java until I realized that I didn't enjoy the language. It felt too cumbersome to me and the directions it was taking weren't ones that I cared to pursue. So after some reflection I stopped learning Java. Was this all wasted time? Hardly. During my sessions I learned more about Object Oriented Programming and how objects fit together. I learned more about recursion while trying to solve a problem for one of my projects. These skills transcend Java, so when I started learning Python I was more up to speed on how objects worked so I could better understand what Python was doing and how it was different from Java. And should the need arise I can revisit my decision to learn Java and see if it's something that interests me again.
It's OK to give up on learning something for a while. We are complex beings and our interests change. We also exist in a complex industry of changing technologies and whims. What was interesting and necessary at the beginning of the year might be uninteresting and unnecessary at the end of the year. It's up to us as programmers to understand our learning process and adapt as our needs and desires change.
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+## Approach with curiosity
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+As beginners we engaged the computer with curiosity and enthusiasm. We don't know what to expect or how long it will take so we take everything at face value. As we learn we trade our curiosity with certainty, and our enthusiasm with expectations. The excitement we got from learning becomes the drudgery of having to continue to learn. But we can re-capture that beginner's spirit by looking at each opportunity to learn as a new experience. We can let go of our expectations of how our learning will progress and instead approach each learning session with curiosity for what we will learn during the session. We can re-kindle the spark that we had when we were beginners with infinite possibilities, and that spark will sustain us through the periods of uncertainty and drudgery.
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+With each focus container we can begin again, with no preconceived notions of how it will end.
projects / themediocreprogrammer.git / blobdiff