Bulldozer00's Blog

While paging through my portfolio of dorky sketches and e-doodles, I stumbled upon one that I whipped up a long time ago when I was learning about Linux shells:

Unless I’m forced to rush, I always bootstrap my learning experience for new subjects by drawing simplistic, abstract pictures like the above as I study the subject matter. Sometimes I’ll spend several hours drawing contextual pix from the lightweight intro chapter(s) of a skill-acquisition book before diving into the nitty gritty details. It works for me because I’m not smart enough to learn by skimming over the “what” and immediately diving into the “how“.

Whenever I feel forced to bypass the “what” and bellyflop into the “how” (via pressure to produce “Twice The Software In Half The Time“), I make way more mistakes. Not only does it degrade the quality of my work, it propagates downstream and degrades the quality of the receivers/users of that work.