Bottom-up Learning

It’s imperative to build on a solid foundation. Whether your building a house or your understanding of a topic, if you build on a faulty foundation you’re in for a bad time. I’ve found this to hold particularly true for software engineering.

Most times I’ve chosen to plow ahead with a lackluster understanding of something it’s come back to bite me with varying degrees of severity. Ranging from missed learning opportunities, to looking ridiculous in front of colleagues, all the way to production outages, I’ve learned the hard way to invest time in learning the details. So much so that I’ve come up with the phrase: details or derails. Or put simply, if you don’t learn important underlying topics and concepts you probably won’t end up where you’re hoping to.

I first started to learn this lesson during my computer science degree. After skating by my introduction to object oriented programming class and “learning” Java I rewarded myself with a year break from CS classes. Returning from my sebatical and enrolling in my data structures class, I quickly learned mistakes were made. It turned out I not only didn’t understand Java, but I also lacked a real understanding of how object oriented programming worked.

Because of this, I spent most of my data structures class relearning what I should have already known so much so that by the end of the semester I barely earned a passing grade really putting the C in data struCtures.

As much as it hurt my GPA (and my soul) this was the wakeup call I needed. This experience helped me adopt a “bottom-up” style of learning in which one burrows deep into the details of a topic before bubbling back up to understand the larger picture. Adopting this style of learning has helped me more thoroughly grok topics, especially in software engineering, and taught me that if I don’t understand something I most likely lack some fundamental knowledge in the underlying details.

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