Mohideen Noordeen

Potpourri of Tips for Technology Learning

- Mohideen Noordeen

Mohideen Noordeen

Try to become Pragmatic, not Dogmatic.

Mohideen Noordeen

Plan, Do, Check, Next.

Mohideen Noordeen

Learning by doing, by experimentation.

Mohideen Noordeen

Keep Mind Wide Open to learning.

Mohideen Noordeen

Identify times of the day when you are responsive to maximal learning and

exploit them.

Mohideen Noordeen

Become a sponge.

Mohideen Noordeen

Learn from different perspectives

the same concept.

Mohideen Noordeen

Allow us to help ourselves.

Mohideen Noordeen

Be kind to oneself when learning challenges arise.

Mohideen Noordeen

Patience is a virtue.

Mohideen Noordeen

Seek the big picture.

Mohideen Noordeen

Conduct experiments to both accelerate learning process and validate the learning.

Mohideen Noordeen

Learn what you enjoy and enjoy what you learn.

Mohideen Noordeen

Be honest to yourself, Pretending to learn is the worst form of learning.

Mohideen Noordeen

When taking something at face-value do it consciously.

Mohideen Noordeen

Try to understand and do not memorize blindly.

Mohideen Noordeen

Focus, Focus, Focus. Work while you work, Play while you play.

Mohideen Noordeen

While learning something, don't be distracted into wider/deeper learning,

jot it down to come back to it later if needed.

Mohideen Noordeen

Setup desired outcomes upfront and

track direction and progress.

Mohideen Noordeen

Value your time, it's one of the most valuable assets.

Mohideen Noordeen

Adopt a quality-focussed mindset.

Mohideen Noordeen

Identify and embrace selected state of the art methodologies, tools &

technologies.

Mohideen Noordeen

Befriend the thing that you are learning, this

makes the process easier.

Mohideen Noordeen

If you hate what you are learning, it's much harder to internalize.

Mohideen Noordeen

Automate the stuff that is repetitive and prone

to human error.

Mohideen Noordeen

Think more, write less by embracing automation

and right choice of tools & technologies.

Mohideen Noordeen

Extreme productivity is the ultimate goal to

leverage our brain power.

Mohideen Noordeen

Self-help is the best help ultimately, so keep your brain sharp and ready at all times.

Mohideen Noordeen

No substitute to hard-work. Work hard and play hard.

Mohideen Noordeen

Sometimes, you have be exposed to breadth-wise learning and sometimes

depth-wise, choose wisely.

Mohideen Noordeen

When choosing to learn completely new concepts, total immersion mode is

a good option.

Mohideen Noordeen

Automate programatically, pragmatically.

Mohideen Noordeen

Automation also has a cost associated, so don't automate everything, it defeats the purpose of automation.

Mohideen Noordeen

Sometimes you have to learn through multiple passes bit like a climbing the hill using

winding roads.

Mohideen Noordeen

When learning entirely new concepts,

concentrate for 2 hours on the subject and take

a half-hour break.

Mohideen Noordeen

Take breaks regularly for the learning to settle and solidify.

Mohideen Noordeen

Open- source software technologies, frameworks & libraries have become

very complex and sophisticated.

Mohideen Noordeen

Don't re-invent the wheel, there's always a library or

framework which does what you want and may

be more.

Mohideen Noordeen

Think, integrate more and write less custom-code.

Mohideen Noordeen

Embracing dozens of libraries & frameworks

and writing little custom-code is better than

embracing a few core libraries and writing

extensive custom-code.

Mohideen Noordeen

Take stock of what you have accomplished in the learning process at key points of the

day, week, month.

Mohideen Noordeen

Embrace continuous refactoring and setup

your project to allow for easy refactoring.

Mohideen Noordeen

"If you do what you have always done, you'll get you

have always got". Therefore, embrace change.

Mohideen Noordeen

You need to leave the "comfort zone" to learn

new things.

Mohideen Noordeen

Sometimes you need to stay in the "discomfort

zone" longer than intended to learn the core-concepts.

Mohideen Noordeen

Sometimes you need to go to the "discomfort zone"

temporarily to learn something specific and small.

Mohideen Noordeen

So it's always an alternation between

"comfort" to "discomfort" zones to optimize the

learning.

Mohideen Noordeen

Assimilate the learning by staying longer in the "comfort" zone after

learning a new concept.

Mohideen Noordeen

Sometimes you have to invert the method to

learn faster.

Mohideen Noordeen

By trying to learn a concept that depends on other unknown things, we are exposed to "on the way"

the unknown things.

Mohideen Noordeen

Don't attempt to learn deeply everything under the sun.

Knowledge is vast and growing exponentially.

Mohideen Noordeen

Rather learn to create a mental big picture to see how

the different componentsset the context.

Mohideen Noordeen

Use internet resources wikipedia to expose yourself to technology topics quickly.

Mohideen Noordeen

When learning a new or break-through

technology, think back at the underlying concepts & methodologies used to

achieve the results.

Mohideen Noordeen

Use automation testing plans to create use case scenarios and vice-versa.

Mohideen Noordeen

Automated testing helps in avoiding long working days and restless nights.

Mohideen Noordeen

“All Code is Guilty until Proven Innocent”

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Separation of concerns is another form of focussing

on the core task.

Mohideen Noordeen

Avoid herd mentality, think different if warranted.

Mohideen Noordeen

Try and adopt lean and lightweight libraries and

frameworks where possible.

Mohideen Noordeen

It's easier to master them and also easier to discard them if you find

a better alternative down the road.

Mohideen Noordeen

Identification of a good technology, framework

or library is both a science and an art,

do it carefully.

Mohideen Noordeen

Do not fall for solutions which claim to offer everything positive,

there is no such thing as a silver bullet.

Mohideen Noordeen

Every technology decision is always a

calculated tradeoff, you cannot have the apple

and eat it too.

Mohideen Noordeen

Don't fall in love with the technologies you embrace or adopt, you

will start having a clouded vision of things.

Mohideen Noordeen

Embrace standards and conventions where applicable.

Mohideen Noordeen

Software is not supposed to cryptic or read-once but rather write-once, read-many by author &

several developers.

Mohideen Noordeen

Remember, software very often will outlive the development team or

developer.

Mohideen Noordeen

Error prevention is better than cure.

Mohideen Noordeen

Sometimes you have to invest in a key-learning process now to get the returns manifold later.

Mohideen Noordeen

Re-usability is a useful feature to have.

Functional programming facilitates this process.

Mohideen Noordeen

Strive to be a continuous learner, both in active and passive modes.

Mohideen Noordeen

Exploit utility libraries when available, they are

there for a purpose.

Mohideen Noordeen

Be aware of the technology trends but

don't try and keep pace continuously.

Mohideen Noordeen

Your time and learning capacity are finite

resources, it's like a slower car trying to keep up with a faster car, It's impossible.

Mohideen Noordeen

Tailor your learning process to keep you

agile in order to learn a lot quickly.

Mohideen Noordeen

Apply what you learnt recently in order to

assimilate and validate the proof the concept.

Mohideen Noordeen

Think of yourself as an extreme lean startup and act accordingly.

Mohideen Noordeen

I wanted to share my learning experiences and advice that I provide to

my junior software engineers at my startup.

Mohideen Noordeen

Mohideen Noordeen MS PhD MoT (EPFL) CEO Inforill Technologies Pvt Ltd

www.inforill.comwww.linkedin.com/in/mohideen

@DeenSquared