Learning Without Burnout
<i>> especially cultural factors that make software development harder for those who can’t pass as</i> YOUNG <i>white males.</i><p>FTFY.<p>I’m 58, and learn faster, and more comprehensively, than I ever did, when I was younger.<p>I think my grasp of “the big picture,” or a high established baseline, is a big reason for the fast uptake. I don’t need to be told what iterators or allocators are. After having designed hundreds of applications, drivers, tools, APIs, SDKs, libraries, and systems, I know <i>why</i> we do stuff. It isn’t just rote dogma.<p>This gives me the flexibility to adapt my view of the world to deal with new paradigms and concepts. Also —and this is important— I can “mix and match” my approach. Most of my work, these days, is a chimera. I will use classic patterns, from thirty years ago, and combine them with new “cutting edge” stuff.<p>That takes flexibility, curiosity, knowledge, and motivation.<p>Also, <i>teaching</i> is important to learning. Especially teaching smart people. It challenges us to <i>really understand</i> what we’re trying to impart, as we are guaranteed to get challenging questions. When I took martial arts, many moons ago, the “postgraduate” stuff was to become a teacher. The Sifu (you know which art) would insist that students achieving new belts, immediately start training those in earlier belts. By the time you became a blackbelt, you were ready to teach an entire class, unassisted.<p>BTW: I never became any good at it, but I did learn some cool approaches to stuff.