Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Welcome to making TypeScript Stick. My name is Mike North, I'm a senior staff engineer at LinkedIn, where I work on developer infrastructure. I've been a Frontend Masters instructor since 2015. And you may have seen some of my other courses on the platform, like TypeScript fundamentals and intermediate TypeScript.
[00:00:17] These two courses represent learning the programming language, and after completing these you should be comfortable reading a lot of TypeScript code. There are also these other great courses on the platform that, to some extent assume you already have a lot of TypeScript knowledge. And these courses on the bottom are about applying that knowledge to solving a new problem.
[00:00:38] For example, in JS and TS Monorepos, we deal with the idea of having multiple subpackages within a single Git repo. And it's almost taken as a given that you can work with TypeScript proficiently. So when Mark the Frontend Master CEO and I were discussing what's next in the TypeScript world for Frontend Masters, I told them that I wanted to help people cross this gap here.
[00:01:05] And this gap represents the kind of thing that you acquire through personal experience through practice, right? And that's what this course is all about. Aside from some updates that have landed recently in the TypeScript programming language which we'll review, there's not gonna be a whole lot of new material here.
[00:01:23] This is more about making TypeScript Stick in your mind. The inspiration of this course is a book called Make It Stick, the Science of Successful for Learning. This book deals with topics like knowledge retention and building a mental model and getting from a state where you have memorized a bunch of facts and you can recall them and you can recite them, right?
[00:01:46] That's sort of the beginning of learning. And then how do you get from there to being an expert where you can take what you've learned and apply it to a problem you haven't seen before. So make it stick is a great book if you're interested, it's really popular among educators, and in fact we're using it at LinkedIn to create the next version of our new hire bootcamp.
[00:02:07] So what does this mean for what you can expect from this course? Well, first, we're going to go through some challenging learning experiences. And this is because there's some science that suggests challenging learning experiences sink in more effectively, right? If we were to sit here all day and do really easy problems, it's not a very memorable thing, right?
[00:02:33] You're not gonna get a lot out of it, similar to if you go to the gym and you pick up the lightest weight you can find. You're not going to actually build any muscle or get more fit through doing that, you need to kind of push your boundaries.
[00:02:45] And when I say challenging of course, I mean interesting problems that are sort of pushing the boundaries. We're not just gonna shrink the text on the slide really small so you can hardly read it, there has to be a meaningful challenge there. So, another thing you'll notice is there's going to be varied and randomized practice.
[00:03:04] So if you've ever taken a class maybe in school where you kind of have a lecture and then a test immediately following that lecture. And then you move on to another topic and you never return to that first thing, it's very easy for that information to fall out of your mind.
[00:03:19] Effectively you're giving your brain permission to let go of that information through not using it. So, part of what make it stick advocates for is continued recall of that information as you apply it in different ways. And you're gonna see that we come at TypeScript from all sorts of different angles.
[00:03:41] There are gonna be some games, some hands on programming challenges, some discussion, some kind of wacky challenges where we'll try to solve problems using only type information. And the idea here is to see these things from all sorts of different angles, so that we maximize the potential for you to have that moment of enlightenment where the light bulb turns on and you feel like you get it, right?
[00:04:07] In terms of reaching that moment of clarity, a lot of people get there through either rule-based or example-based approaches. And you may find that one of these ways works for you, people generally fall into one of these two buckets. People who prefer a rule-based approach, they want to learn about the rules of a system and the kind of build up their mental model.
[00:04:32] And maybe they can understand how something works without seeing too many examples, but they want to see the specification, like how does this work? How does mental work? Others don't get a lot out of sort of that theoretical knowledge, they want to compare and contrast different examples in the real world.
[00:04:50] And they kind of infer how things work based on that, and that's how they reached that moment of enlightenment. So we're gonna have a mix of these two, just because I want to turn on as many light bulbs as I can for all of you. In terms of how I recommend taking this course, not that it's an option for those watching live, but if you're watching the video, try to space this course out a little bit.
[00:05:14] Watch a little every morning for a week, give this a little bit of room to breathe. There is some research that suggests space it out learning is about 90% more effective than cramming, right? So if you've ever crammed for an exam study like crazy the night before, everything kind of falls out, you sort of put everything in your short term cache, it's very easy to let go.
[00:05:39] So space it out, and also own your learning journey. So this is something that I do, I have a learning journal where when I have trouble wrapping my head around something, I'll write it down, I'll write down what parts of that topic confuse me. And, this gives me a place to keep coming back when I have time to invest in myself and to sort things up and do some extra reading.
[00:06:04] It helps focus me in and spend my time on the things that are blocking me from sort of moving forward. And as an added benefit every time you're struggling with something if you open this book and you see a bunch of crossed out topics. The things that seemed impossible at one point in time, it's very reassuring to say this current thing that seems like I'm never gonna get it, it's just like things that I've conquered before, right?
[00:06:32] It's just one more thing to the pile. So with that, let's jump over to the course website, bit.ly, and then make-ts-stick.