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The article discusses the concept of learning in public, emphasizing the importance of sharing one's learning journey with others. I reflect on personal experiences, highlighting the benefits of accountability, consistency, and connecting with like-minded individuals. Platforms for sharing achievements, participating in challenges, and potential downsides, such as distraction, are explored. I encourage learning in public, but advise maintaining a balance between sharing and focused learning, drawing from my experience in transitioning to web development. Overall, the article advocates for the positive aspects of learning in public while cautioning against potential pitfalls.
What Is Learning in Public?
Contrary to what it sounds like, learning in public doesn't mean picking a public spot and taking your study sessions there. Learning in public means that you share what you're learning or working on with other people. There are no rules when it comes to the frequency of sharing, but most public learners try aiming for sharing their progress on regular basis.
In this article, we're going to take a look at some of the main reasons why people choose to learn in public, which platforms they usually choose for sharing their progress, and whether tracking all your successes and pitfalls on daily basis is always a good idea.
Why Should I Do It?
I've been a serious self-learner for almost a decade now. During my university years, I was spending thousands of hours on learning English and Chinese. While still in grad school, I started being interested in learning web development, so I did a lot of research on what I needed to learn, picked a free learning resource to see if I would possibly like it, and started self-teaching myself how to code, irregularly at first.
In the beginning, it was quite difficult to stay consistent and consequently, I began to notice that I am not making that much of a progress. After listening to a number of podcasts about self-studying programming and gaining motivation to accomplish your goals, I noticed that one piece of advice seemed to be popping out all over again: Make sure you hold yourself accountable. My English was't that good back then, so I even had to google what self-accountability means. I could try explaining the term myself, but I really like an explanation I found in an article about on Indeed, so I'll quote them instead.
"Holding yourself accountable means you manage your work and life tasks responsibly, fulfill your obligations to colleagues and reflect on your work conduct consistently. You also accept the outcomes of your decision-making processes and assess any changes you want to make in the future. People who hold themselves accountable can complete tasks more effectively and predict outcomes with more accuracy."
Another piece of advice that kept on appearing across the developer community was to publicly commit to your learning, and to regularly share your progress with others. After checking out a few social media accounts of people who were sharing their progress on daily basis, I was 100% convinced that it's something I had to do in order to stay consistent, and I got to work!
Except for the accountability and consistency, you might want to consider connecting with like-minded people. And learning in public is great for that!
Which Platform Should I Share My Achievements On?
There are probably hundreds of platforms and format to choose from when it comes to sharing your progress publicly. I am going to give you examples of some of the most common ones, but mind you that I am a developer, so the platforms listed here are highly influenced by that fact.
Hashnode
Instagram
Twitter—Will people ever start calling Twitter (sorry, I mean X) X?
HackerNoon
Medium
I sort of grew up on Instagram and I've always been trying to use as few different platforms and apps as possible, so it was a natural choice for me. In addition to that, I came across many developers there, both traditional and self-taught, so I was hoping to connect with some of them as I didn't know any developers in real life back then.
Generally, I would recommend picking a platform that you're most comfortable with and where you're likely to come across like-minded people. In case you're thinking about monetizing your content in the future, you might want to put some more thought into it and do some research, but that was never the goal of mine, so my criteria were pretty simple—community and simplicity.
But Wait—What Should I Talk About? Join a Challenge or Start Your Own
Ok, so you picked a platform and now what? What do you say? What format do you use? How often do you post?
Naturally, all of the above is completely up to you. The world is your oyster!
In case you don't know how to start, try to find a learning challenge. In the web dev world, coding challenges are very common, but you can apply them to pretty much anything you're learning.
Can't find any challenges in your field of study? Create your own and encourage other people to join you! Learning to knit? Commit to knitting for 30 minutes every day for 10 days. Learning animation? Commit to release a new video every month. Learning to draw? Commit to drawing one sketch a day for a month and posting photos of the result. Learning something you can't showcase? Talk about it instead. You get the idea.
What I did was the 100 Days of Code challenge which has a set of rules that you should follow, but it's really up to you if you decide to tweak the challenge a bit. There are many other challenges out there, such as 30 Days of JavaScript, 365 Days of Code, or seasonal challenges like Hacktoberfest, Advent of Code, Advent of CSS, Advent of JavaScript.
Is Learning in Public Always a Good Idea? The Ugly of Learning in Public
Generally speaking, learning in public is an awesome idea, but only if you have time for it, and only as long as it doesn't interfere with your learning.
In my experience, publicly committing to learning to code and posting about it had led to awesome things. Most importantly, I ended up achieving my goal and have been working as a web developer for over 1.5 years now. Secondly, but not less importantly, I made many great connections in the community and even turned a few of them into real life friendships.
However, I myself am guilty of getting extremely sidetracked when I first started learning programming back in 2019. After I completed the 100 Days of Code challenge, I realized that I had rushed through many topics and put the commitment to posting about my learning first. My focus was somewhere completely else than it was supposed to be. Acquiring any new skill takes a lot of time and your focus is key in that process. My attention was on sharing, not learning, and I believe that my transition into web development would have been much faster if it wasn't for the many online distractions I let into my life back then.
If you'd like to read more about the importance of deep work and the benefits of lack of disctractions, I highly recommend reading Deep Work by Cal Newport (actually, you can't go wrong with any of his books!) and Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley.
A week ago, I had decided to start sharing my learning journey again because it came up at a bootcamp that I'm currently learning frontend development, and I thought it would be fun to try a new platform, and start talking about my progress again so that it becomes more tangible. Luckily, the history won't repeat itself because I was able to recognize the moment when I had begun to spend way too much time on summarizing what I had learned on each day. Keeping a daily learning journal isn't feasible for me, and I'll be switching to weekly (or maybe bi-weekly, who knows).
Based on my experience, the best advice that I can give to anyone who's looking into learning in public is: Go for it! 100 times, go for it!! Learning in public is a great way of building the habit of regular studying, but keep your eyes on the prize. If you start noticing that you're spending more time talking about your learning, than in focus mode, and you have no trouble staying consistent, drop it, or switch to a less regular format. If posting about your daily progress becomes important to you, you can, for example, try summarizing what you've learned in 2-3 sentences only and put the saved time into creating new neural pathways.