Learning
When we are learning a whole new set of concepts, we have to choose the battles we want to fight for. It’s a process in which we can’t go for the “I’ll produce nothing until I’ve fully learned all the theory behind each of these concepts”. If so, we could end up frustrated and never archiving the milestone of producing something. The reason behind that could be related to the psychological mismatch between the effort we’re putting into the process, and the results we’re obtaining. If we want to find a more grateful learning process, we’ll have to assume certain truths. We can see it as an act of faith. Some black boxes in the set of concepts to learn. This way, we would be cheating a little bit in the task of learning, but being able to reach out the sensation of being productive earlier 🚀. This way maximizes the possibilities of finally producing something, and makes it possible to maintain our motivation until the moment of being able to face the black boxes we’ve assumed. If we see the learning process as an investment, we’re extending a loan to ourselves in our way to learn something. There’ll be a moment in the learning process in which we’ll be ready to face these black boxes and pay our loan (a developer always pays his debts 💪). Then, there will be a lot of kind people ready to share their knowledge, and even some companies concerned about spreading the word who has developed an amazing learning playground such as the Scala exercises one (I highly recommend the Cats library course , #cosaFina 👌).
Teaching
I think about these acts of faith as something to promote from the teaching point of view. We should be able to detect when a concept is susceptible to act as a black box in a certain point, and ask our students to have some faith in us just for a while. Usually, that permission will be granted implicitly. I mean, we are the ones who have to decide where to focus our message beforehand, so unless some student ask for it explicitly in the middle of the class, it wouldn’t be noticed 😛. This could be seen as unprofessional (just like the emojis I’m using in this post). However, I tend to do so just because of the reasons exposed above 🙂. PS: I know I’m not discovering any breaking theory here. That’s not the intention. The purpose writing this was just to write some post in english, help someone publishing it, and say thanks to 47 Degrees and the whole Software Development Community for making this profession culture so awesome 🤘.