What I Learned About Learning: My Time as a Flatiron Student

My experience at Flatiron School has been invaluable to me as a programmer and as a student, but the most important thing that I’ve gained over this time was not any particular skillset with a given language or framework. Instead, perhaps unintuitively, my biggest takeaway is simply a new way of learning new skills, especially when it comes to coding, and that’s what I want to share with you today.

A Lecture is Never Enough

The first thing that I want to touch on, what I think is the most important thing, is that simply attending a lecture and listening to a teacher tell you how to do something is never enough. That may have been sufficient in some of your college courses where the memorization of facts was enough to be successful, but when you are trying to learn a new skill, you have to put it into practice yourself.

My Work Flow

No matter how simple the concept, I try never to learn two new things in a row without putting each one into practice first. The best way that I have found to do this is to start a new project whenever I begin learning a new language or framework and find a way to incorporate every new piece of functionality that I learn as I learn it. This has the additional benefit of keeping me coding when it would otherwise be easy to go a week without any practice. More than that, I believe that using newly learned information in a different and original way is the best way to show that you’ve really learned it.

Additional Resources

There are a number of outside resources that proved to be incredibly valuable to me during this time. The first one, which is criminally underrated, is the broad category of “source material.” I’ve seen a lot of people really struggling with new concepts who were only trying to learn through tutorials without ever visiting the official documentation for whatever language or utility they were trying to learn. Tutorials can be a great resource, but when you’re trying to understand something at a very fundamental level, it’s hard to beat going straight to the source.

Some of the more specific things that I have found to be incredibly useful are Edabit, Binarysearch, and LeetCode.

Edabit: Edabit is a wonderful website that houses tutorials as well as coding challenges. My favorite functionality of their website is the challenge section which allows you to find coding challenges to hone your skill on, filtering by both subject and difficulty. You can find challenges for 8 of the most popular languages ranging from brand new, first time coder experience levels to expert level challenges sure to test anyone.

Binarysearch: I spent more time on Binarysearch than any other outside learning platform during my time at Flatiron, and I will continue to spend a lot of time there moving forward. What’s different about binarysearch is that instead of helping you learn any particular language, it’s set up to help you learn how to write algorithms and hone your logic and problem solving skills. The practice room allows you to set a difficulty and even filter which companies’ technical interviews you want to see questions from.

LeetCode: LeetCode is perhaps the most comprehensive of the three. While Edabit and Binarysearch both excel in their own areas, LeetCode offers tutorials, guides, practice interview questions, and community coding challenges. If you choose to, you can even subscribe to a premium membership to access more features such as current interview questions from top tech companies like Google.

Keep Coding

If there’s one thing that I want to leave you with, it’s that you should always keep coding. Practice the things that you already know, and learn new things that you’ve never done before. Doing so in the form of personal projects is one of the easiest ways to do so because you get to pick an application of these skills that’s guaranteed to hold your interest.

Thanks for reading, and remember to stay tuned on this blog!