Lazily Evaluated Learning

One of the things you'll often hear as a programmer is that to be successful, you need to be constantly learning. Sometimes that's learning about a new technology, or learning a technology you use more in depth. It feels to me that this is getting harder and harder - there are always more frameworks, more programming languages, more tools to learn. Keeping up is difficult, especially if you have other people or things that demand your time. I have a little trick I've been using for some time, and I'd like to share my secret with you, dear reader. I call it lazily evaluated learning.

If you know what lazy evaluation is already, you may see where I'm going with this, and you can skip this explanation. Put simply, lazy evaluation is a technique that some programming languages, such as Haskell, use where a piece of code isn't actually run until its result is needed. It looks something like this:

let result = reallyExpensiveComputation();
if(userShouldSeeResult) {
  displayResult(result);
}

In the example above, reallyExpensiveComputation is only run if userShouldSeeResult is true. So, how do you apply this to learning?

The idea behind lazily evaluated learning is to defer learning until you need to know something, but keep enough information on what you need to know. For example, there is a lot of information on writing Haskell out there, such as this overview by Alexis King. I'm not actively learning Haskell right now, but if I start someday, whether for fun or for a project, I have a list of articles in my personal wiki tagged with "improve haskell" that I can fall back on.

All you need to do this is have a good source of articles (I like https://lobste.rs, but whatever works for you!) and some sort of personal archive, preferably with tagging, whether that be something like TiddlyWiki or Evernote. Another tool you can use, which especially helps when it's a skill you use too rare to remember effectively, but you stil use semi-regularly (for me, this is R), is to use a spaced repetition flashcard program like Anki. This allows you to load a skill into your brain very quickly.

I actually have cashed in on this technique in the past: when I started at my current job at Threadless (a Python shop), I had dabbled in, but never seriously used, Python. Having a list of Python resources to review when I started really helped me to skill up quickly and hit the ground running. This idea has helped me manage the fatigue that comes with trying to keep up, and hopefully it can do the same for you!