horusscope said...[...]Also, I've found that looking at other people's code is probably the single most useful thing I've done in refining myself as a programmer. There are gazillions of man-hours of thought floating around out there, condensed into hidden little snippets of code. Sometimes you can gain years of someone else's self-refinement in 5 minutes of code-browsing.
If you really want to learn, the shortest route is making things.
[...]
Mempo said...I actually noticed that after I posted. It's similar and useful but not nearly as expansive as what I'm looking for. That's okay, I can hope for the future! Though automating my stopwatch process is a nice quality of life improvement.HigginsHere said... Anyone wanting to take a crack at this yet? :DHave you noticed the Egg Timer script by horusscope?
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/16316-wanikani-egg-timer
It's not ideal though, because you'll still have to write down the time after each review.
HigginsHere said...Generally just knowing how much time I spend on WK would be awesome, totals, averages, across lessons, reviews, and even the forum.
horusscope said... @MempoDid you just respond to something I wrote more than a month ago? I'm confused. It's kinda coming out of nowhere ^_^
Taking courses is great of course, but I always joke with other programmers that you learn everything in college except how to solve a new problem.
If you really want to learn, the shortest route is making things. Sure, the first few won't be the most epic masterpieces mankind has ever known, but you'll learn a lot and the internal motivation is really powerful; the satisfaction of even minor successes will super-charge your memory. Sometimes it's difficult to think of something you want to make, but I suppose this is a problem in every craft, whether it's writing, painting, modeling, woodworking, construction, architectural drafting, or anything really. The way you develop genuine talent is straight practice.
So do absolutely learn the foundational knowledge from schoolwork, but don't let it stop you! Don't wait!
It's kind of embarrassing but my first learning experiences were hacks. I had to learn all kinds of undocumented knowledge, or knowledge that was so obscure that even on the modern internet it's not really very available. Things like how to detour functions in the IAT, the PE format, how to proxy a program through a local service by hijacking its winsock.connect, ahhh I'm going off track. Just getting the first prototypes of my program to work took weeks of spending 'all day' making no progress whatsoever. What kept me going was that no one else had what I wanted, or probably other reasons, who knows how the subconscious really works. Still, all the hours and hours I put into just writing code are what made me who I am today, not that you can see of course, but if I had only gone to school I probably would have given up or gotten nowhere. I bet it's the same for artists, too.
I wouldn't pick something insanely difficult as a start though, I think making userscripts ranks great on the learning chain. Javascript is a good language with great roots. When you make a script, you don't actually have to have a goal, just like with drawing or something. All you have to do is play with it and have fun :)
gl ~
I firmly agree school teaches useful things but without extra-curricular studying, you don't really know much. Most 'useful' things I've learned, I did on my own.
I'd like to add that I've written 3 scripts since then and fixed/adopted/hosted 5 others.
Thanks for the advice though. I'm on a break now, but coding shall commence again next week ;p