I am about 12 hours into a long web development course and I retain roughly nothing between sessions. I get one hour on weekday evenings, occasionally two at the weekend. Do I push through the remaining 28 hours first so I have the full picture, or abandon it and start building something badly with what I already know?
With one hour a day the biggest single win is ending each session by writing three lines about where you stopped and what the next step is. I lost fifteen minutes every evening just remembering my own code before I started doing that.
Pick a project you actually want to exist, not a tutorial project. My third to do list app taught me nothing. A scruffy tool that tracked my bouldering sessions taught me forms, storage, dates and deployment because I kept wanting one more thing from it.
Also type the code, do not copy paste it, and once a section is done close the video and rebuild the same thing from memory. It is slow and it feels like a waste of a precious hour, and it is the only thing that moved retention for me.
Rebuilding from memory sounds miserable but so does forgetting everything, so I will try it for a fortnight.
Mild pushback: if you are 12 hours in and genuinely do not yet know how the pieces connect, finishing one more coherent chunk can be worth it. Not all 28 hours, but whatever section takes you to the first end to end thing, then stop and build. Building with too few pieces is its own kind of stuck, where you cannot even phrase the search query.
Fair, and I think we agree on the shape. The trigger to leave should be can I make anything appear on screen, not have I reached the end of the playlist.
@flat_fix_finn · 4w ago · 3 replies
Build, but do not abandon the course, demote it to a reference. The retention problem you describe is exactly what happens when input is not followed by recall, and an hour a day is plenty to build if none of it is spent watching.
Concretely, I would spend the next two weeks making one small thing end to end, something like a page that takes a form input, stores it, and lists it back. When you hit a wall, jump to the relevant course section, watch eight minutes, come back. You will finish the course anyway, just out of order and with a reason to remember each piece.
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@inbox_zero_ivo · 4w ago
Demote it to a reference is a good reframe. I think I was treating finishing it as the goal.
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@venv_val · 3w ago
Course completion is a metric nobody will ever ask you about. The thing you built is the thing you talk about.
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