Effective Learning

I've neglected what seems to be an important bet of my personal future for far too long, so I've recently been slowly getting back at personal side projects. One important aspect has been trying to get the basics right, or at least as right as possible. A lot of mistakes have been made in the past and while I live under no illusion that no mistakes will be made this time, I'm gladly undertaking the challenge of trying to learn from what went wrong before. Hopefully, things will simply be better, not necessarily good yet. And better means closer to success.

Yesterday, after my usual bike ride in the afternoon, I had a chance encounter with Cláudio in our porch and we ended up talking for a bit precisely about past experiences and in particular the challenges we face while designing web sites or web applications. As our joint ventures slowed down to a halt, he got more seriously involved in his girlfriend's startup in a sort of technical advisor/web [master,designer] capacity. He tells me when he rolled up his sleeves and got down to designing and building the company's website he came to the sad (yet somehow invigorating) conclusion that he simply didn't know how to build a website, all our past experiences notwithstanding. So he said his solution was nothing more, nothing less than reading a couple of foundational books, one about principles of (beautiful) web design and another about principles of Photoshop usage.

This got me thinking and wondering how foolish we've been in the past, not only going straight to designing and messing up with no basics under our belts whatsoever, let alone hitting the computer right from the get go by writing a bunch of HTML and CSS first thing. It obviously couldn't work, because we simply aren't geniuses and no house has ever been built from the roof down. Not to my knowledge, anyway.

So, armed with broadened abstract reasoning we have picked up from years of schooling and personal experiences in a multitude of domains, we must have what it takes to pick up any book on these subjects and effectively learn from them. With this in mind, while designing a roadmap for the development of my web application, I'm accounting for reading just as much as for anything else, like sketching screen mockups, surveying technology or figuring out how to pay for hosting.

Sounds like a step in the right direction, one that gets me closer to where I want to get.