Efficiency

Today’s post is about learning new things more efficiently, i.e. wasting as little time as possible on learning. I use the Feynman technique, named after the physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman was known for his ability to break down complex facts into their core message and to convey them very easily. You certainly know the concept of being able to explain things to others in order to better understand them yourself. That’s exactly what I’m doing with my blog and that’s also the goal of the Feynman technique. Feynman’s focus is on not tricking yourself, after all, you don’t fool anyone as easily as you do yourself, but to really dig into a topic. ...

How often did you tell yourself that you want to learn a specific skill and you either stopped while learning it or learned it but never managed to apply it in your workflow? I bet you encountered both situations more than once. In this article, I’ll cover my method on how I learn new skills efficiently and actually remember the stuff I read. In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts and experiences in learning new skilly. While my examples are mostly centered around programming and software development, I’m sure that you can apply the most of the principles in other topics as well. ...

In today’s article I would like to give you an insight into the usage of a tiling window manager, which I will illustrate with the example of i3. A tiling window manager divides the screen into non-overlapping areas. You are probably more used to a stack-based system where windows can overlap. However, the concept of avoiding overlapping offers a major advantage: Due to the pure operation of the computer via keyboard, it is possible to work at a faster pace after a short training period. ...

While being fun, programming is not easy. To be able to dive into a flow state in which you’re completely focussed on the topic, you need to cut off all distractions. With this article I would like to introduce you to my methods of working in a more focused manner and give you some tips that might make your life much easier. My experiences mostly come from the programming area, but the following tips can be extended to various other topics. ...

Comments are used in a lot of programming languages. While this concept is useful for a lot of purposes, beginners often start bad habits when commenting their code. In this article I will explain when comments are useful and on the other hand illustrate problems where commenting can be less meaningful or even disturbing. Bad Comments … At first sight (especially at the beginning of your programming career), you might think of comments as the perfect way to describe elements of your code that you don’t fully understand. This approach is not entirely wrong, but it does have a few problems that I will now discuss. ...