Re-visiting My 2019 Learning Goals

Written by Tinjure WP Posted on

Recently I was revisiting Learning in Public post by Shawn Wang and Tania Rascia’s Learning in Public page. Inspired by these posts and Dan Abramov’s Things I don’t know as of 2018, I thought to write a brief reflection on how I have been learning & re-visiting my 2019 learning goals (a full post in preparation).

Learning in Semi-Public

It’s almost a decade that I started learning web development, what I called ‘semi-public‘. Why semi-public? It’s because I document what I learn as a journal because it reinforces me to conceptualize & retain the subject matter better. However, significant part of my learning-notes are private and only few I posted in my personal blog. Only recently, when I started deep diving into JavaScript, ReactJS & GatsbyJs learning endeavor, I posted all my learning-note posts in public. I am working on to put all my learning note in public. Until now, my learning approach has been best summarized in the following quote from Sara Soueidan.

Just write — write down what you learned, no matter how big or small. Start a blog and publish your writings there. Don’t think about whether or not people will like or read your articles — just give them a home and put them out there. – Sara Soueidan

Content consumption

Bethany Crystal in her post ‘Content consumption vs. content creation‘ puts our habits of content consumption or creation into different groups. I wish I would have fall in one of those but I don’t think I do. Often I attempt myself to both consume and create contents but I don’t always succeed, to be honest. Occasionally, I am carried away by daily headlines and breaking news without creating any content.

Often I start my day with content creation but once in a while I drift away to consume topics that are of interest to me. For example, if there are interesting posts in my core learning areas (eg. Gatsby sites, React SPAs, WordPress Gutenberg editor, etc) I seem to spend my entire learning time consuming contents than creating new content. I must focus on content creation.

Re-evaluating Learning approach

In a post late last year, I took time to re-evaluate my learning approach & set some learning Roadmap. After about 9-months here I am revisiting my learning goals again because of fast technological innovations & changes. Since best way to learn is by teaching, I should continue my documented learning approach with a goal to content sharing.

Start every day as a producer, not as a consumer. – Clay Johnson | Lefehacker

My broad revised learning goals include:

  • Rest API to GraphQL. Focus learning GraphQL rather than REST API because GraphQL will be replacing REST API. Gatsby with WPGraphQL could easily fetch data from WordPress. As WordPress themes are heading to the dead end, headless Gatsby WordPress themes are emerging.
  • React SPA to Gatsby Sites. Most of the goals that I wanted to achieve with React SPA could be achieved with Gatsby in much sorter time and ease. Indeed, I have achieved most of the goals with GatsbyJs.
  • Create more content: My new focus will be on creating content, how large or short content. Just keep on creating content not just for documentation but sharing as much as possible through blog posts or publication in other websites.
Learning to Share

My new renewed focus will be learning & creating contents for sharing. I have been fortunate to get benefited from posts, tutorials, guides of other developers. Its time for me start sharing my learning experience to others too who are just beginning their learning endeavor like I was not while ago. I am still doing everyday.

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