Kodsnack 83 - Easy by virtue of travelling the hard way

<p>We chat with <a href="http://codeofrob.com/">Rob Ashton</a>, freelance developer, speaker and recent discoverer of how to learn things properly, live on stage during <a href="http://www.oredev.org">Øredev</a> 2014. Topics include learning, the plateaus of learning and how to actually do things right to keep evolving and learning. The problems of frameworks wanting to make X easy. Perhaps we should learn about programming in general instead of learning the next big framework in the hope that it will solve our problems without us needing to understand them?</p> <p>This recording exists as good as it is thanks to <a href="http://steveonjava.com/">Stephen Chin</a> of <a href="http://nighthacking.com/">nighthacking.com</a> for providing and masterfully wrangling all the necessary technology.</p> <p>Comments, thoughts or suggestions? <a href="http://techworld.idg.se/2.2524/1.603280/">Discuss this episode</a> at Techworld!</p> <h2 id="links">Links</h2> <ul> <li><a href="http://codeofrob.com/">Rob Ahston</a></li> <li><a href="http://vimeo.com/110972838">Rob&rsquo;s keynote from At the frontend</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell">Haskell</a></li> <li><a href="http://clojure.org/">Clojure</a></li> <li><a href="http://oredev.org/2014/sessions/all-about-that-spec">Rob&rsquo;s good use of the guitar</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strum">Strumming</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_%28learning_method%29#Deliberate_practice">Deliberate learning</a></li> <li><a href="http://oredev.org/2014/sessions/refactoring-to-functional">Refactoring to to functional</a> - talk at Øredev by Hadi Hariri</li> <li><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.datagrid%28v=vs.110%29.aspx">Datagrid</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms">Winforms</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.ats-lang.org/">ATS</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_%28programming_language%29">Erlang</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog">Prolog</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion">Recursion</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Fold">Fold</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/List_comprehension">Haskell generator functions</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphism_%28computer_science%29">Polymorphism</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/gen_server.html">gen_server</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD">MUD</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure">You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_%28engineering%29">Latency</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud/help6/Intr0197.htm">Macros in MUDs</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_%28MUD%29">Wizards in MUDs</a></li> <li><a href="https://angularjs.org/">Angular</a></li> <li><a href="http://vimeo.com/110973785">Angular 2.0 talk</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell/Lazy_evaluation">Haskell is lazy</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.asp.net/web-forms">Web forms</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.npmjs.com/">npm</a> - the Node package manager</li> <li><a href="http://facebook.github.io/react/">React</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/swannodette/om">Om</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript">Clojurescript</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93print_loop">REPL</a></li> <li><a href="https://facebook.github.io/flux/">Flux</a> - Facebook&rsquo;s architechture style used by them with React</li> <li><a href="http://emberjs.com/">Ember</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29">Bash</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK">AWK</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed">SED</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.purescript.org/">Purescript</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cloud_Haskell">Cloud Haskell</a></li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_%28software%29">Docker</a></li> </ul> <h2 id="titles">Titles</h2> <ul> <li>I haven&rsquo;t got an elevator pitch for myself at the moment</li> <li>I&rsquo;ve become a real person living in the real world</li> <li>It has changed the way I approach learning</li> <li>I just build software every single day</li> <li>Tangible and listenable</li> <li>A transformative moment</li> <li>Fingerpicking and scales</li> <li>Competent throwing things together</li> <li>I wouldn&rsquo;t say my day job betters me</li> <li>Why am I learning this crappy pointer stuff</li> <li>Deliberate learning</li> <li>Easy by virtue of travelling the hard way</li> <li>My day job is mostly Erlang with a hint of C</li> <li>Erlang is acutally incredibly boring</li> <li>Lisp with horrible syntax</li> <li>Things that mutate in the background</li> <li>The world becomes a happy place</li> <li>I&rsquo;ve started writing a MUD in Haskell</li> <li>And then you die in the next scene</li> <li>A problem that noone has anymore</li> <li>It&rsquo;s good for you imagination</li> <li>Factory providers and god knows what else</li> <li>Hate&rsquo;s a very strong word</li> <li>The framework ain&rsquo;t gonna help you</li> <li>Shortcutting problems</li> <li>I don&rsquo;t do prescriptive</li> <li>Preferable to gouge my eyes out with a spoon</li> <li>That &ldquo;wonderful&rdquo; is sarcastic</li> <li>It was an abomination</li> <li>If there is such a thing as good C</li> <li>Transcoding and cloud nonsense</li> <li>That&rsquo;s because you skipped the learning step</li> <li>Copying and pasting things off of the internet</li> <li>Shuffling piles of binary around the place</li> </ul>