Spaced Repetition in Programming | mem.dev

Key Takeaways

like most developers you probably visited stack overflow and after you found the solution you were looking for you proudly copy and pasted it in your editor but did you remember any of what you learned is it even important to learn what we learn and why absolutely the more you learn the more fluent web developer you become and therefore you're more likely to ace that interview or even get a raise one way to better remember what you learned is to space repetition the concept of space repetition is not new it has been researched and proven to work for decades in this short video i'll explain how space repetition works and also show you an amazing tool made especially for web developers for example you're learning how to reverse a string in javascript how to create a length less than c or maybe even some machine learning algorithms in python from the second you learn that your brain starts forgetting it bit by bit every single moment that you don't go over it again that's what we call a forgetting curve and it is kinda scary if you review or better yet actively retrieve the material at increasingly spaced intervals after learning it the forgetting curves starts to flatten out and you get a lot better long-term retention the goal here is to review the material at exactly the right time it turns out that the best time to revisit the information you're trying to learn is right around the time you'd naturally forget it practically this means having more widely spaced intervals between study times for the material you're more familiar with and shorter intervals between study sessions for the material that you're less familiar with so if you want to keep all the most important knowledge syntax methods and specific language know-hows you have to repeat it in certain intervals to fully retain the information some studies showed that space repetition increased the learning efficiency by up to 40 percent this strategy is extremely important for programmers and developers because we always have to be up to date with newest trends and technologies and we're constantly learning knowing about space repetition is one thing but what about applying it how can you know when you should revisit a specific part of the information well it would be hard holding yourself accountable and following a certain learning schedule ain't nobody got time for that that's why researchers and software developers created computer algorithms to try and help students optimize their learnings these algorithms help you learn by sorting information based on your responses to questions if you got a question wrong it will automatically prioritize that information for repetition over the information and questions you answered correctly in doing this these algorithms actually make you a more fluent developer a developer that is more likely to ace a job interview or even get a raise one of the best parts of space repetition is that it suggests that we gain a lot by studying smarter not necessarily longer that said space repetition means challenging yourself to apply your learning right at the point where you start forgetting it and that can sometimes be kind of hard that's why we created memdev a space repetition learning software dedicated especially for programmers let's go to the home page and check out this interactive demo you can choose the language highlighting and in this case they greeted us with an exemplary react.js snippet now you can choose certain syntax you want to be tested for in addition to react component let's also choose the render method you can say that this card is about react and that you just learned how to create a react class component then we can click continue and now we practice let's see i think i know this react dot component and as you can see that's correct now we can choose whether this was good or too easy for us and based on that this card will appear more or less often in the future based on the principles of space repetition and that's it feel free to sign up and let me know in the comments what you think about the software and if you'd like me to cover its use cases in more detail using it consistently doesn't take more than 5 minutes a day which is crazy if you still have some questions scroll down on the page and pick the situation you're currently in whether you're taking a course or a boot camp you're job hunting and want to ace an interview or maybe you just got hired and want to make a great first impression mem dev is for you just click the link and it's going to give you an explanation on how to use it to the fullest based on your specific situation in my opinion mem dev is one of the best educational tools for learning programming definitely worth checking it out and that was it on space drop edition i hope you liked this video and if you'd like more similar videos to this one in the future let me know in the comments thank you so much for watching and see you in the next one