

Understand How It Works - martinrue
http://martinrue.com/posts/12/understand-how-it-works

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ColinWright
Please, please increase the contrast on your site. Gray on barely-lighter-gray
is really tough to read.

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martinrue
Thanks, I'll try to make it a bit more readable.

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PeterisP
The font is completely unreadable on win/chrome (for example, 'e' has the
horizontal line missing at default font size).

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PavlovsCat
same on win/opera

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chewxy
My dad gave me a similar advice too. Turns out this advice works with my
personality: everything can be considered a puzzle and I have great fun
working things out.

I like figuring things out to understand them. Allows me to extrapolate on
them and make fairly okay/spot on predictions. Works well on most fields from
math to computer science. Doesn't work as well when you try to apply this on
human beings.

That I think is where I come into a lot of difficulty when interacting with
humans. Trying to understand humans is not like trying to understand machine
parts of math theorems. You cannot take them apart. I still have no idea how
to understand how humans work

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philbarr
There's a problem when you apply this to software development. There are so
many frameworks and APIs out there that it's impossible to truly learn them
all (to the point that you truly understand them as opposed to just knowing
how to use them), and they are generally superceded in a few years by the next
best thing anyway.

I used to spend time looking through the code of open source projects to
understand quirks or things I didn't fully understand, but the pressures of
work mean that new libraries just don't get the attention they deserve. Hence,
you end up in a rather depressing best-guess approach when using new libs, and
revert to google/StackOverflow if you have a problem.

I much prefer to fully understand things.

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ExpiredLink
This isn't a very helpful advice. We always understand how it works. Our
understanding is often superficial and even wrong but nevertheless sufficient
more often than not.

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gahahaha
I honestly don't like this advice.

Remembering stuff is what gives you the tools to understand - you simply can't
understand without a large collection of facts. Facts aren't sufficient, but
they are necessary. Trying to jump over the "knowing stuff" phase leads to a
very low quality understanding.

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6d0debc071
There are, however, some elements of knowledge that are more important than
others - and it's often important in learning to check that you actually
understand something on which stuff is later being based rather than just
forging ahead and hoping it all works out okay.

Besides, the advice was never to _just_ remember. You know? Ask questions,
build on your current understanding - if that requires you to go and learn
more facts, go do that. It's a question-based method of learning.

Makes sense to me anyway - how I learn most of the stuff I do :/

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martinrue
Apologies for the poor design, I'm working on improving it. The posts are
Markdown and can be read directly on GitHub if you're struggling with my
awesome design.

[https://github.com/martinrue/martinrue.com/blob/master/posts...](https://github.com/martinrue/martinrue.com/blob/master/posts/12.md)

