Before heading in deep, let me explain my background.

Growing up I was the “smart kid” you know the one person in class who doesn’t need to study for tests or anything in school, I was like that until the end of high school, and you may think that’s great! Right?

No, it isn’t, Why? As the “smart kid”, I never learned proper ways of learning, meaning how to sit and read a book, how to have a schedule, etc. So when I got to my Computer Science Course it started to crumble to pieces.

During this time, at the time of writing less than a year, I would do ok-ish to great in programming classes, besides some exceptions, at the same time my math classes were always barely passing the class, and that didn’t change until the second to last year when I joined a program called Apple Developer Academy.

In the Academy, I discovered a method called CBL, challenge-based learning, that consists in finding real-world problems based on team or personal engagement using the research to back the solution.

So in this method, I create a text document(docx, pages, etc.) and write down any question that I have, even the “stupid” ones, and research them one by one writing down the answer and the source.

After getting all the answers you create a text solution and then go code, since I’m a developer, the proposed solution.

But let’s extract the beefy part of CBL:

Do you see this? This is the solution I was needing for my life, a structured way of studying, a technique, and not someone saying “It’s easy to study you just do it”.

So let’s do it!

First, you must create a document or get a piece of pen and paper, writing it down is an important step!

Now think about what you need or want to learn, and start with simple questions:

to leave the realm of abstraction let me show you my CBL file for the framework AlamoFire:

as you can see these are simple questions, but they make a difference when I want to refresh my memory*.

*A caveat of being a coder is that a project has more content than the document itself like shown here: Don’t worry about the code is just an example.

but that doesn’t mean I cannot use CBL for other things, After learning it I use it for basically anything, I do not create a file for everything but the mindset is there and I can structure my thinking around how I’m accustomed to learning.

Now that you know a structured way, let’s make this become a habit.

How?

By using it almost daily if possible, I had the advantage that my apprenticeship allowed me to use it every day, but if you don’t have that privilege, try at least 15 minutes per day when you can. Bear in mind that a new way of thinking doesn’t settle in a day or two it takes time and effort.

What topics should I Learn?

Start with stuff That you wanna learn or already is learning, The advantage of this system is that you can modify your file to better suit the topic or the way you think, personally I prefer fewer questions with more content but I know people who prefer a lot of question with smaller bits of knowledge.

Should I always write it down?
In some way yes especially for things that you want to use long term, for the short term probably is fine to not bother with that.

Is Writing the source important?
I believe that yes it’s, who never found a great resource just to lose it because your browser crashed or you didn’t bookmark it.

I have more questions or spotted a grammatical error can I contact you?
Absolutely yes! LinkedIn is the easiest way for me to reply: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lugalu/

I hope that this has been useful for you,
Peace, Luiz Jose.