I found my notebook on learning JavaScript 3 years ago

While reorganising our living room yesterday, I found this notebook!

I was reminiscing about the time when I first joined my current company three years ago. My team and most of the engineering teams in the company use TypeScript and JavaScript for many repositories, so I started to learn these two programming languages to keep up with the team's speed.

I love writing things down so at the beginning, this is how I started: Writing it down! 😄✍️

My source for studying was freecodecamp

For some time, writing down what I had learned felt good and encouraging. However, I quickly realised it was not a sustainable way of learning a programming language, and I couldn't learn as fast as I wanted to with only writing, so I changed my strategy.

Don't get me wrong, I still love writing things down and creating documentation for knowledge sharing. Especially at work, I make sure that I create documentation, whether it is on Confluence, code comments, README files, or Slack messages for new things I learn and find useful. Firstly, it is because I can't remember everything and don't trust my brain sometimes. Secondly, I believe it helps other team members, current or newcomers, save time on asking around, so the knowledge is not lost.

Back to my new strategy of learning JS and TS, I stopped writing it down since I had learned enough of the basics. I started getting a hang of the language by practising on the tickets that were assigned to me. I tried to read the code base for any tickets I worked on. If there were anything I didn't know, I would Google it, watch a YouTube video, or head to StackOverflow, w3schools, MDN web doc, or TypeScript handbook.

I then wanted to learn more about advanced TypeScript so I bought Typescript: The Complete Developer's Guide course on Udemy with our company's budget allocation for learning - Thank you Go1! It was a great course that helped me feel more confident in understanding the code base and writing my code. The course also provided guides on building some personal projects which was fantastic for practising. I didn't complete the course though. Working in tech means I need to learn fast and move fast, so if I have enough to keep going and complete my tasks, that's okay to move on to learn other things. On the other hand, I believe in the Pareto, which suggests that by learning just 20% of the key concepts in a programming language, one can easily tackle 80% of the necessary tasks. (Be honest: how many Udemy courses have you completed? 😄)

Fast forward to today, I mainly use TypeScript at work but do I stop learning TS/JS?

No, I'm still learning it over the time. I learn from the company and my team's code base, other people's coding style, and the comments and feedback loop my team members give me. I also learned a great deal from solving LeetCode problems - I love solving DSA problems because it helps me improve my problem solving skills immensely.

If I had to learn JS/TS from scratch again, I would definitely keep my learning from practising and from other people. But what I wouldn't do again is writting it down on paper, because it's quite time-consuming. I would also pass the option to buy a course. The reason is nowadays, learning a programming language is so much easier with the help of AI such as ChatGPT. It can help me outline the most helpful and important things to kickstart learning the language of my choice and help me set up the framework or the development environment. I can also rely on ChatGPT to customise my learning routine, test my knowledge and coding ability with the new language, and suggest a personal project to practice. It's really handy with the help of AI and ChatGPT and I think it has changed my learning style significantly.

I'm in awe of how technology has made learning better and brought knowledge more accessible to billions of people - including the platform that our company, Go1, develops. I'm also a strong believer that I can learn anything with the mindset that I can research anything and resolve any problem with the help of the internet and AI, and more importantly, with the knowledge sharing from people around the world. That's what "standing on shoulders of giants" really means!