Kodsnack 83 - Easy by virtue of travelling the hard way

We chat with Rob Ashton, freelance developer, speaker and recent discoverer of how to learn things properly, live on stage during Øredev 2014. Topics include learning, the plateaus of learning and how to actually do things right to keep evolving and learning. The problems of frameworks wanting to make X easy. Perhaps we should learn about programming in general instead of learning the next big framework in the hope that it will solve our problems without us needing to understand them?

This recording exists as good as it is thanks to Stephen Chin of nighthacking.com for providing and masterfully wrangling all the necessary technology.

Comments, thoughts or suggestions? Discuss this episode at Techworld!

• Rob Ahston
• Rob’s keynote from At the frontend
• Haskell
• Clojure
• Rob’s good use of the guitar
• Strumming
• Deliberate learning
• Refactoring to to functional - talk at Øredev by Hadi Hariri
• Datagrid
• Winforms
• ATS
• Erlang
• Prolog
• Recursion
• Fold
• Haskell generator functions
• Polymorphism
• gen_server
• MUD
• You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
• Latency
• Macros in MUDs
• Wizards in MUDs
• Angular
• Angular 2.0 talk
• Haskell is lazy
• Web forms
• npm - the Node package manager
• React
• Om
• Clojurescript
• REPL
• Flux - Facebook’s architechture style used by them with React
• Ember
• Bash
• AWK
• SED
• Purescript
• Cloud Haskell
• Docker

• I haven’t got an elevator pitch for myself at the moment
• I’ve become a real person living in the real world
• It has changed the way I approach learning
• I just build software every single day
• Tangible and listenable
• A transformative moment
• Fingerpicking and scales
• Competent throwing things together
• I wouldn’t say my day job betters me
• Why am I learning this crappy pointer stuff
• Deliberate learning
• Easy by virtue of travelling the hard way
• My day job is mostly Erlang with a hint of C
• Erlang is acutally incredibly boring
• Lisp with horrible syntax
• Things that mutate in the background
• The world becomes a happy place
• I’ve started writing a MUD in Haskell
• And then you die in the next scene
• A problem that noone has anymore
• It’s good for you imagination
• Factory providers and god knows what else
• Hate’s a very strong word
• The framework ain’t gonna help you
• Shortcutting problems
• I don’t do prescriptive
• Preferable to gouge my eyes out with a spoon
• That “wonderful” is sarcastic
• It was an abomination
• If there is such a thing as good C
• Transcoding and cloud nonsense
• That’s because you skipped the learning step
• Copying and pasting things off of the internet
• Shuffling piles of binary around the place