Lazy-learning

I’ve been thinking lately about my approach to learning. When I become interested in a technical subject (e.g., Rust), I tend to throw myself into learning it, even if I don’t have a specific problem to solve with it. I’m driven by curiosity and the desire to understand how things work. Which is excellent from the standpoint of cross-pollinating ideas. However, since I don’t use them, I end up forgetting them, leading to a feeling of having wasted my time.

With many developers on Mastodon and X talking about WWDC, I can’t avoid but think: Should I watch some of the talks? Part of me thinks that I should because I might get ideas for problems to solve with Tuist. But the other part of me thinks that the ideas presented in it, and which I’ve seen people talking about on various social networks, are enough for me to envision the problems that I could solve with Tuist. When the time to work with them comes, for example enabling complete strict Swift concurrency in Tuist, I can simply look up the documentation and learn what I need to know. I feel it’s a more effective way of learning because it’s goal-oriented. I decided to call it lazy-learning.

So I’ll try to apply this approach going forward. I’m currently diving into Apple’s Virtualization Framework, Swift Testing, and how to flip a German company to the US, because these are the problems I’m facing right now.

And you? What’s your approach to learning?