Learning is a life long process. While doing any projects or having trouble shooting something considered to be a small matter turns out to be a rather big thing in learning.

All learners make notes about their learning just like we students did our class notes. Learning a new topic requires a lot of research, reading tutorials and blog posts. That can only give an overview on the subject.

Actual learning is by doing projects, which reinforces us into deep learning. While reading, we might feel we understood the topic but that does not really translate into doing a project. After a few projects only the concepts may become clearer.

Even though we might be able to do projects through self-learning, to tell others what is learned is even more difficult. That requires a very clear understanding of the subject and putting together a step-wise thought process to tell the story to others in a more coherent manner.

Learning Rabbit Hole

Often learning a new topic leads to a deep rabbit hole too. Today I was reading an article in the CSS-Ticks where Benjamin Schachter discusses his learning experience while trying to fix a simple one line of CSS code in an open source project. After spending some time learning deep about the process, he concludes that the process was worth the effort of his learning process.

Even in my own case, earlier this week I was trying to set up a staging website in a new account. I have probably done this process hundreds of times before. This case was slightly unique that the account had no domain setup yet but still I wanted to check on a browser that the site transfer process was OK and no content was compromised during the transfer.

The process required me to learn “hosts” file editing which I had never done before. I spent almost a day researching and learning about it and finally I was able to complete the process the next day. It was a frustrating experience initially as I wanted to complete the process as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, I was happy that I learned something new during the process which I would not have done if that was not the case.

Learning is always an exploration journey!