Hi,
I’m Oscar from California. I’m 46 and going through a software engineer curriculum and looking at ways to help improve my retention on programming concepts as well as vocabulary/definitions. While one aspect of programming is simply muscle memory, there is definitely a lot of new terms and concepts that require memorization.
If anyone else has had experience learning a programming language with these techniques or anyone in general that has suggestions, I’d love to hear about your experience.
I’m a self taught full stack web developer. If this is the area of programming you’re going into, I can offer my two cents, or at least an exercise I found useful. I think programming, sorta like chess, is less about memorizing things and more about pattern recognition. I found it useful to build the same app over and over again. Find a tutorial on YouTube for, say a blog app for example, that uses the stack of your choice. First time around, just code along with the tutorial. Take notes and make lots of comments in your code. Really spell out what your doing and why. Try to see the patterns for back end and front end development. Second time around, still reference the tutorial but also refer more to your previous code and build the same app again by trying to remember the patterns. Add some new features to your app. Repeat the cycle. Rely less on the tutorial each time, until you are able to build a full stack app without following a tutorial.
Wow, such great feedback and information. Thank you all. Yes, the field I am going into is web development. We covered Server Side Language (Plain Ruby) and OOP. The Next courses which are the ones that I am worried about and got me in the sense that there is a lot to remember is Network, Javascript, and DOM & AJAX.
@Josh - Thank you so much for the great resources! Going to scour through them for additional strategies. Here is an example of some concepts Id like to commit to memory: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Overview
@Dr.Bennet - Love the walk through on taking the time to really absorb the material.
Interesting. I don’t know why I thought it had to be a memory palace. Drawing out the concepts makes a lot of sense. A friend suggested mind mapping. I am intrigued to see what you may come up with.
@Josh I can’t thank you enough for those links. You explanation of your process on how you learned Go is fantastic. I also love the Jack Kinsella’s - Janki Method. I am going through his you tube videos at the moment. Lastly, I did like @elitely suggestion on learning mnemonics as it will help with so many other things and will look into that as well.
