Learning to learn

When was the last time you thought about how you should be learning? Like many, I realized I went through formal education immersed in different kinds of learning methods but remained oblivious to reasons for using them. This has always bothered me because I enjoy learning, a lot and quickening the speed of it whilst reaping all the benefits, is the ultimate goal. With that motive in mind, I decided to enroll in the free course: Learning to learn by Terrence Sejnowski and Barbara Oakley on Coursera. This blog post will outline some of the insights I have found helpful.

2018

As is custom, at the end or start of year I share my goals and progress as we close and open new chapters. I don’t think there’s an actual chapter closed or opened, it’s comforting to think about it that way but i think life is a continuos stream of … life events that ultimately define our entire existence, there is no break. None. Whatever it may look like, it is a continuation. It’s a mere formality then to state that the last year and all that took place had been a long time coming, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Comparing what my aims were at the end of 2017 and now, I cannot help but feel like I am no longer as open with some of my ideas, goals etc. The reasons behind that are not quite apparent to me, but going through last year’s post I even marvelled at how much I shared about my life and where I intended to go. I sure do hope to investigate my reasons for initially defaulting to scraping the surface with this blog post.

Recent takeaways from pairing

A couple of weeks ago, my workmate paid a visit to Harare from his place in Cape Town for some pair programming, again (yay!). After having had a head start in coding a web app for a mobile application (built with Xamarin), the objective was to quickly knock it into shape and ship it out. I had chosen VueJS for the frontend (because it’s awesome), supported by an API in Laravel - to maintain consistency with the mobile app, we wanted everything to remain exactly the same. During the time of pairing, I learned even more lessons than the other times when I have paired with other programmers.

Working time

For the past few weeks, actually since the start of the year, i’ve experienced the most turbulent of times in terms of my daily schedule. Really i wish I was Cerberus, or could teleport to Mars and have slightly longer days. I’ve been under massive, gargantuan pressure to code, exercise, plan, reply emails and continue being a human who’s not a joker.

How to add your own executable scripts to bash

I have been enjoying the book Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau. One of the great tricks of becoming more effective is to set workflows that make you do more, much faster. I have ended up setting a few scripts to automate a lot of bash commands such as ssh-ing, using git etcetera and in this short primer i’d love to show total newbies how to have your own executable scripts from any place on your system.

The first thing to note here is Mac OS has a few candidate files in your home folder that it indexes for commands to use in every bash window. On my system, I prefer to use ~/.bash_rc mainly because it is loaded up when a new instance of a terminal window is opened compared to ~/.bash_profile which is loaded up at login.