Today I really understood what deliberate practice was all about.
What did I do today?
Wrote and ran the birthday app I watched yesterday.
It’s a simple app that asks you for your birthday and then tells you, how many days to or since your birthday.
What did I learn?
- I spent at least 30 minutes hunting down and looking up errors, caused by a tiny typo. I ought to be more careful.
- On the other hand, while I know the basic syntax, my python vocabulary isn’t large enough yet. I still need to see what my 80/20 ratio of fluency to lookup will be. Right now I am looking up everything.
- I am beginning to think of programming as cooking. It’s a really good analogy and it makes programming a lot less intimidating.
- And finally I actually figured what deliberate practice was all about. I worked at a hard enough task that was just out of reach. As opposed to times in the past where stuff was too easy or frighteningly hard. This is a really good space to work in. My head still hurts, but it hurts in a good way 🙂
Onwards …
P.S. Speaking of deliberate practice1, James Clear has an excellent guide here.
which in a way, is what #100daysofcode is sneakily about too 🙂 ↩︎