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This is true for education as well. You can hear or read something and think you understand it, but you really don't unless you can reproduce the explanation, compare it to a ground truth, and verify that you got it.

The percentage of time you are doing that exercise is the percentage effectiveness of your education.

The nice thing about programming is your program is its own ground truth (programs are proofs). It either does what you expect it to or it doesn't (for the most part).



I've found interleaving (https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving) and spiral approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach) helps. First came across the spiral approach when reading the pickaxe book to learn ruby (https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/index.html) and the idea stuck so now I try to approach new subjects using the same technique by gradually making the "spiral" smaller as I focus in on a given topic.




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