It has become very clear, just by being around my co-workers at Arm ATG, that I need to be spending time outside of work learning on my own.
College might be the most expensive sampler into the chip industry. That’s not to say it wasn’t worth it, but it’s hard to extract everything from college without oversubscribing and burning out.
I got to hear about almost all layers of the stack — so I have almost a decent amount of the field in my periphery at least — but I only really got to understand just a few layers, and not even as deeply as I’d like.
To spend my own free time learning, I need to schedule it (a lot of things in my post-college life would benefit from having my plans on a calendar).
It also needs to be planned ahead of time. Like what am I learning, and where am I learning from. Just like a workout plan. It’s okay if progress is slow, just needs to be forward and steady.
Some rules:
- Do my note-taking here. Networked thought. Links, links, links.
- Be okay with being wrong. It’s okay if my notes are incorrect or incomplete, as long as I’m constantly striving to improve them.
- Work in public. Find ways to hear from experts and get feedback. Help other like-minded people learn.
I’ll end with words from Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research”.
“You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible.”