Today we spent finishing up our workshop on React Router v4 and I just had to take a pause and talk about the “value of opinionated progression”.
This is a big idea so let me back up a bit. A lot of people talk loosely about “learning how to learn” in college but if you really press them on it they don’t really have a framework around generalized learning (i.e. it’s usually a load of BS when you hear that phrase). However I talked on Impostor Syndrome about the four factors that I think lead to a good learning program: Progression, Discipline, Support, and Shipping.
Today was a fantastic example of the value of opinionated progression. A “progression” here refers to increasingly harder challenges that are designed to stretch you at your current level. This is preferable to, say, “throwing you in the deep end”, or aimlessly swimming around a sea of beginner-to-intermediate tutorials. Progressions are necessarily opinionated - to advance up, you have to have some idea of where “up” is. I choose to emphasize it here because the value was tremendous and yet non obvious. (Opinions are also valuable in terms of selecting parts of a library to focus on - libraries can be huge and all parts may not be equally practical - so guidance on and application of specific parts instead of the entire documentation is also helpful)
Before today I had not fully appreciated how hard it is to teach Javascript professionally. Fullstack Academy constantly renews its syllabus to keep it up to date, but can you imagine what that’s like when the subject matter changes as rapidly as Javascript? Let me give some idea of it: 2 years ago Fullstack was proudly on the MEAN stack. Within a year they had ripped half of that out to switch to the NERDS stack (no, NERDS isn’t yet a thing…). For my cohort they ripped out jQuery and were developing and introducing brand new course content within a matter of days (it was cutting a bit close but was generally handled well).
React Router v4’s rollout was plagued with complaints (check out the Hacker News hate) and people stressed over migrating to v4. The “unofficial” status of React router even pops up as an issue in discussions over whether to adopt React at all! That is a ton of meta-discussion to have an to someone just learning who has no basis to form an independent opinion it is easy to get confused among well informed opinions that vehemently disagree.
Today I looked around the room and realized that this class of students were simply being taught something that had only rolled out five months ago and were completely (ok, generally) oblivious to the furor and pissing contest over which X is better. And because of that, they are able to get productive faster, and when the inevitable time comes to learn some new thingy that obsoletes what they know, they’ll have some fundamental knowledge to map the new thing onto. But they wasted no time browsing Hacker News, and instead focused on getting productive, and had help from knowledgeable instructors who had done the groundwork. By the end of this week they will have learned Redux too. They will have done with confidence in a week what I took over a month to learn without.
This is the value of opinionated progression.
in other news, I wrote up my empireconf proposal today with really good feedback and encouragement from @kirjs. I don’t actually feel qualified at all to do this but it’s worth an hour or two of proposal writing.
also i randomly accidentally trolled Martin Shkreli today