Fediverse, how do you keep track of what you read?

I've been obsessed with reading lately. Not just the act of reading but retaining what I've read. I know there are concepts and tools like "a commonplace book" (basically a personal collection of knowledge and quotes), flash cards, spreadsheets, Goodreads, etc etc. I never seem to stick with any of them.

@Rovine I think retention is a wholly personal experience. Some are visual, some auditory, some spoken learners. But besides that there are subtle details that are important.

What I can say is this one universal fact, learning is **all** about association. Memeorization as a pure practice is a failed practice, if you are doing it, stop. Instead try to take the things you want to memorize and thing about how it associates with other things, even if those things arent important. For example think about how a word might sound like some other word, and what those words have in common, or other things. Just anything that creates arbitrary associations in your brain.

@freemo That explains my struggle with programming at the moment.

Say, I watch a tutorial about double arrays in Javascript. I don't have personal experiences yet that calls for double arrays, so everything flew over my head. Then when I encounter a situation to use double arrays, I felt bonkers because I had seen it in action but don't remember how to implement it.

It's probably a really difficult scenario because much of programming is abstraction...

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@Rovine I've been codigng for almost 3 decades now. HTML and CSS wew some of the earliest things i learned, I use them almost every day as a coder.... I still need to relearn things from time to time even with something as simple as html...

Its ok its normal

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@freemo Heckn margins man. The fact that margin { 0, auto; } magically centres elements still baffle me. It's one of those cases of "It's still magic even if I know how it works".

@Rovine @freemo Ooh, I did a presentation (and get to give it again next week!) about some cool CSS tricks and why they work, including this feature of margins and why they collapse.

Need to update them, and the slides themselves tell very little, but here they are if interested. slides.com/wolfpaw/power-of-cs

@david @freemo Cheers mate. I love how we went from retaining reading to ranting about CSS. Thank you for sharing this.

@Rovine

I find about 97% of all technical conversations end in me bitching about CSS :)

@david

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