
_Inspired by the Coursera course "Learning How to Learn" by Dr. Terrence Sejnowski and Dr. Barbara Oakley. Note, I’m not a scientist and all information below based on the researches mentioned in the [course](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)._

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## Table of contents

- Part 1. [How to cope with procrastination](#part-1-how-to-cope-with-procrastination)
- Part 2. [Chunking](#part-2-chunking)
  - 2.1. [Illusion of competence](#21-illusion-of-competence)
  - 2.2 [Seeing the bigger picture](#22-seeing-the-bigger-picture)
- Part 3. [Explore memory: long and short term](#part-3-explore-memory-long-and-short-term)
- Part 4. [The importance of rest and mindfulness](#part-4-the-importance-of-rest-and-mindfulness)

## Part 1. How to cope with procrastination

Procrastination is the process when your brain tries to change the focus from the tasks that increase your anxiety. You should know that a lot of tasks at first make you feel bad and that’s okay, you should be okay with that and keep in mind that this sneaky feeling will go away as soon as you will make your first steps. To fight those feelings try to use tips below:

- Divide and Conquer

  - Divide big tasks into small chunks (in the best case a lot of 30 minutes achievable tasks

- Pomodoro technique

  - The technique is based on dividing your work into 25-30 minutes intervals when you’re concentrating on one thing

  - That’s why in the previous section I recommend dividing big tasks into small chunks. In the best-case scenario, you can use each timer for a sub-task that you’ve created in the previous step.

- Reward

  - Use rewards after each complete Pomodoro. It’ll make you more comfortable with achieving tasks.

  - Keep a planner journal
    The journal will help you to track your progress. Note that writing down your work completion time is very important. It’ll help you to avoid overworking and burnout

  - Try not to fill your journal with a lot of tasks (4-7 is best) cause it may increase your anxiety level

  - Try to start each day with a hard task. Even if you procrastinate the remained task, at the end of the day it’ll make you feel better that at least you’ve done something

## Part 2. Chunking

Chunking is the process of uniting bits of information through meaning. You can’t remember tons of information without understanding and creating a big picture that’s why you need to understand how to form chunks. Use tips below to improve your ability to create and maintain chunks.

- Importance of context
  - You should understand the context in which the content you’re trying to “chunk” is going to be used. Use the top-down process (mentioned below) to make sure you buy into context.
- Spaced repetition
  - You need to repeat the information that you need to “chunk” regularly to keep neural connections tight (see Chapter 3 for more information)
- The bottom-up process
  - Is the process when repetition and practice can help you build strong chunks
- The top-down process
  - Is the process of seeing the bigger picture to better understand the context in which the “chunk” is going to be used. For example, you can look through the whole book, explore chapters and images to better understand.

### 2.1. Illusion of competence

Sometimes when you’ve just read the material or watch the lesson and the material is in your working memory (see Chapter 3), you might be in a state called “illusion of competence”. It’s the state of mind when one might think that he mastered the topic. At the same time, you should understand that knowing and doing are different things. To avoid such a bias, use tips below:

- Try to use the knowledge you’ve just learned by doing
- Recall
  - The process when you’re trying to regenerate the material that you’ve consumed right before. (For example, try to close the book and recall everything you’ve just learned)
  - Retelling information and content to yourself or someone else might help you to be fluent in the topic and understand what parts you miss.
  - Mini-tests might help you to understand (Coursera’s tests after chapters do help to understand the material better and get back if you missed something)
  - Avoid highlighting a lot of content
    - Highlighting might give you the wrong assumption that you’ve worked with the material and mastered it. Try not to take a fancy to highlight (one for a chapter is enough), instead use recall techniques

### 2.2 Seeing the bigger picture

As I’ve mentioned in the ‘Top-down’ process, seeing a bigger picture of the material might help you to form a better understanding and create strong “chunks”. At the same time, you should be aware that there’s some biases that might disturb you.

The first bias that might disturb your learning process is the Einstellung effect. It describes the bias when the first idea on “how to solve a problem” might block other ones (even if they’re better than the first one).

Another bias is Overlearning. It refers to a state when some is practicing newly acquired skills more than it needs. It might lead to a state when you are focusing just on one point of view related to the topic.

If you want to really master the topic and avoid biases mentioned above, Interleaving technique might help you. It’s the process of jumping back and forth between different problems and situations. It gives your brain time to analyze the issue and come up with a better solution. A good sleep or walk might also help you to overcome overlearning and Einstellung effects.

## Part 3. Explore memory: long and short term

Let’s review long and short term memories and understand the differences between them. First, we need to understand that memory is the faculty of the brain responsible for storing and retrieving information. They’re highlighting two kinds of memory: long and short term memories. The difference between them is in the capacity and duration. Some studies show that in the short term memory we might store from 4 to 7 chunks of information and they have time limits and if we aren’t careful of repeating and practicing them, they are going away. Meanwhile, the long term memory capacity theoretically is infinite.

If you’re interested in improving your memory and ability to memorize information, consider using following tips:

- Spaced Repetitions
  - Is the technique of repeating information or practicing the skill regularly with some skipped intervals
- Memory palace technique
  - The technique is based on the knowledge that (evolutionarily) we’re remembering places extremely good. So we can use this knowledge and connect the information we want to memorize in the context of places we know

## Part 4. The importance of rest and mindfulness

Sometimes the only thing we’re concerned about is productivity and self-improvement. And if one continues thinking only about work or learning, it might lead to the point when some will have no fuel left to continue being productive or even worse it might lead to burnout. If you want to prevent yourself from being in a state when you can no longer work without the help of other people, you might consider the following tips.

- Work-life balance
  - One should know that setting boundaries between work/study and life can really help you to achieve harmony and have a healthy state of mind. Try to set borders between working and resting hours. Elsewhere you might be in a situation when you have troubles in both areas.
- Leisure time
  - Try to set a time when you’re done with the work and dedicate remaining hours on leisure. Sometimes you can even have a list of things you want to do (e.g. watching tv shows, reading fiction, etc.)
- Physical activity
  - Studies show that some intervals of physical activity might improve your learning skills and help you to better solve problems.
  - At the same time, such physical activities as running, walking, and even lifting heavy weights will improve your health and give you more energy to face daily routines and problems
- Mindfulness practices
  - Studies show that mindfulness practices are tightly coupled with switching on your brain’s default mode network which helps your brain to better process information that you consumed during the day.
  - Consider meditation, repeating mantras or even physical activities mentioned above as a way to practice mindfulness
- Sleep
  - I guess I shouldn’t write that sleep is the most important part of rest and processing information, so I’m not going to tell you tales about profits of getting good sleep, I just want to ask you to get enough.

Thanks for your time and attention.


A little list of tips which may help you to increase your productivity and start learn better. Based on the work of Dr. Terrence Sejnowski and Dr. Barbara Oakley.

Management and Learning tips


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I remember a day, a few years ago, I was reading the “Deep Work” by Cal
Newport. Cal was telling about the importance of focused deep work and
how high is the cost of distraction.

The book triggered me to start being mindful of the harm notifications
Starting from that day I started to turn notifications off but in a slow mode without stressing myself and throwing myself at the feet of the FOMO.

> 🙀 FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) — fear of not being included in something (such as an interesting or enjoyable activity) that others are experiencing

So, here is my one-year plan on how to gradually disable notifications.

| **Time**    | **Easy**                                                                             | Hard                                  |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------- |
| Q1 | Turning off secondary applications (e.g. photo editing, sports)                      | ---                                   |
| Q2 | Turning off productivity apps (e.g. todoist, Trello, apple reminder)                 | Turning off Emails                    |
| Q3 | Turning off social networks (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)                      | Turning off Services (delivery, taxi) |
| Q4 | Turning off all applications except phone calls (e.g. messenger, telegram, WhatsApp) | Turning off everything                |

_The plan is flexible, so you can change it as you wish._

## Additional Materials

- [Deep Work by Cal Newport](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692)
- [The Key to Happiness in a Distracted World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lay89Tk2nk)


Past year I was gradually limiting applications which can distract me and now I finally turned all notifications off.

🔇 Notifications off


Recently I had a webinar (in Armenian) where I was talking about programming languages and stacks, their differences, and how to choose one.

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In the article we're going to speak about five major software application types and ecosystems (languages, frameworks, libraries they have):

## Table of contents

- Part 1. Software Application Types
  - [Web Applications](#web-applications)
  - [Mobile Applications](#mobile-applications)
  - [Desktop Applications](#desktop-applications)
  - [Machine Learning](#machine-learning)
- Part 2. Algorithm for choosing a language
  - [Tips](#tips)
  - [Experience](#experience)
- Part 3. [Materials](#materials)

<span class="text-red-400">Note,</span> I've created also a <a
  target="_blank"
  href="https://mm.tt/1772184228?t=1vsSDGshVQ"
>
  Mind Map
</a> for the information I'm going to tell below. Make sure to follow mind map using
the link or images that I've attached to each chapter.

## Web Applications

When speaking of web apps one should imagine sites that he is using every day. They usually consist of two parts: frontend and backend.

> Frontend — is the practice of converting data to a graphical interface, through the use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so that users can view and interact with that data. (Wikipedia)

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HTML stands for hypertext markup language — the backbone of every page that lives on the web.

> Hypertext is the text which contains links to other texts. (Ted Nelson, 1965)

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and its main purpose is to make sites look gorgeous.

And JS stands for the most popular language that millions of people use daily.

> The front end is an interface between the user and the backend. The backend has three parts to it: server, application, and database. To handle the backend of given applications, programmers or backend developers have to deal with backend technologies that include languages like Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and many others.

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One of the groups of backend languages includes those that have a strict type system and tight coupling with OOP ideas. These languages are Java, C#, C++, and many others. They are very popular among big enterprise companies due to their strictness and safety. Usually, newbies find them hard as a first language because of the high entry threshold.

Another group of languages includes those that have a dynamic type system, mostly they are multiparadigm with a low entry threshold. They are easier for learners because you can jump into the language very fast and see the result. JS (Node.js), Python, Ruby, PHP are the most famous languages. Big tech companies, like Twitter, Github, Basecamp are using Ruby (and Ruby on Rails framework) for backend development. Facebook and VK have been created using PHP (at least first versions).

Pros of web apps:

- One development team for all Operating Systems (user only needs browser)

- Development speed due to the infrastructure of libraries and frameworks which allow solving almost all problems.

- Low entry threshold

Cons of web apps:

- They lose to native apps because of the lack of access to hosting platforms (for example, Notifications, GPS, Cameras). Although I hope that Web 2.0 and PWA's will change the situation and WEB will be great again.

- There's no way to create high GPU-consuming apps (like big games) in WEB.

## Mobile Applications

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Researches by Statista are showing that in the third quarter of 2020 the half of the traffic worldwide came from mobile devices. I'm almost sure that half of the readers are also using mobiles so there is no need to describe what mobile applications are.

What is not clear when we're speaking about mobiles is their types and what languages one should master to start coding. To clarify that, let's explore three approaches to mobile development.

### 1. Hybrid applications

> A hybrid app is essentially a combination of a native app and a web app. Although this type of app can be installed on a device like a native app, it technically is a web app. These types of apps are built with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript and run in a web view.

So technically you still are writing your HTML, CSS, and JS
 code like you was doing in the case of web apps but now you're running the code in a web view.

One might think that this is brilliant technology and we should use it as a standard because now we can share the code between web and mobile, but things are not that easy. Hybrid apps are not showing good performance: apps are freezing and their UX suffers a lot (you can sense that even physically that the app is written for the web, not the mobile world).

### 2. Native Applications

When speaking about native apps, we should mention that there are two major operating systems for mobile: iOS and Android and both of them have their languages with big ecosystems.

For many years in the iOS world, the main language was Objective-C but then apple presented Swift which is easier for developers and now it's a de-facto standard for iOS applications.

In the case of Android, there's the same scenario, Java was the main language but then JetBrains presented Kotlin which took part in the market.

Native Apps had better UX due to their connection with host OS and direct access to the Notification, Camera, and other APIs.

At the same time, companies need two development teams to handle both Operating systems because it's not frequent when one developer knows both languages. It's the main disadvantage of native applications.

### 3. React Native

React Native combines the best parts of these worlds: it allows to write code that runs on both Operating Systems (actually 70-80% of the code), it allows companies to use frontend developers and their knowledge of JS and React and during the parts where React (and js) are close to their limits (GPU-consuming operations), you can write code on Swift or Kotlin and connect it with React Native via the so-called bridge (see RN docs for more info, it's really interesting. I promise).

## Desktop Applications

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The desktop world is similar to mobile. As the main advantage, we can see better UX because of the access to the Host Environment.

And as in mobile, here in Desktop, there are two popular approaches to development.

1. Native Applications
   Here we can use a lot of languages, like C# (created by Microsoft and works great on Windows), C++, Java, etc. The only problem is that in some cases we need multiple languages for different Operating Systems.

2. Electron Applications
   JS Ecosystem has reached even this point and using HTML, CSS, and JS we can build cross-platform desktop apps. VS Code, Facebook Messenger, Figma, WhatsApp have been created with Electron. Also, it worth mentioning that Electron applications are cross-platform which means the code can be run in different OS environments.

## Machine Learning

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There are many languages that one can use for creating ml products: Python, R, JS, C, C++, Java, C# but the big part of the market are developing the products using Python because of its big infrastructure: tons of libraries and platforms like Tensorflow are available for Python (also for JS). That's why Python is the number one choice for ML.

## Tips

Finally, we know about most software application types and now we can create an algorithm for picking a language and our algorithm will base on three criteria.

### Skills and interests

If you are interested in visual information representation and working with the product that end-users are gonna face, then maybe frontend, mobile or desktop stacks are for you. Elsewhere, if you're not interested in visual and more in data processing and manipulation then you should consider Back End or ML stack is right for you.

### Mentors and Environments

Mentors and people who surround you are also very important. So if most of your colleagues and friends know any programming language, then you should consider that one because their role in your first steps will be crucial.

### Languages by market

The one thing that newbies should also take into consideration is the market. If there's no need for developers for the language that you consider then maybe it's not the best option. That's why it's really important to check what the market needs. I'd recommend to stard with [Stack Overflow survey](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020) to understand market needs better.

## Experience

I chose JS and React Ecosystem because of their cross-environmental approach. JS and React are being used in Web, Mobile, Desktop, and even ML which allows me to focus not on technologies but on creating applications. I also understand that JS Ecosystem is not the best performance-wise and sometimes reaches its limits but in most cases, it gives me tons of other benefits.

I hope that I helped to create a framework that will help you to find your language and most importantly, your ecosystem.

## Materials

1. [Mind Map for different languages and their infrastructure](https://mm.tt/1772184228?t=1vsSDGshVQ)
2. <a target="_blank" href="/static/slides/how-to-choose-language.pdf">
     Get Slides
   </a>
3. [Stack Overflow Survey](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020)
4. [Frontend Interview Questionnaire](https://github.com/vre2h/interview-questionnaire)


Text version of a webinar that I've been given on 27th of March, 2021.

😈 Unpopular opinion. Ep 3

Ep 3: University Education is Important!

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Management and Learning tips

🔇 Notifications off

How to choose a programming language?