Just in case learning
JIC learning is the old fashion way of learning; you take courses, read books, and do exercises then hope you might be able to apply the skills/knowledge you learned someday.
Unfortunately, the shelf lives of technologies are getting shorter & shorter. New technologies emerge every week. As a result, people in the IT world started the 2nd phrase of learning:
Just in time learning a.k.a. Googling
Leveraging Google & Stack Overflow, solutions are just few clicks away as long as you can ask the right question and able to weed out lamp solutions. And the ability to ask right questions are depends on your learning matrix level:
Learning Matrix Has 4 Levels
Level 1: Unconscious Incompetence (You Don’t Know that You Don’t Know)
Level 2: Conscious Incompetence (You Know that You Don’t Know)
Level 3: Conscious Competence (You Know that You Know)
Level 4: Unconscious Competence (You Don’t Know that You Know – It Just Seems Easy!)
If you are in Level 1 or you are ignorant to part of the solution space, then you might come up with poor questions, and therefore sub-optimized solutions.
Here are the things you can do to stay away from this trap:
- Don’t dive in and start solving your problem.
- Come up with a list of questions / problems you want to solve in this domain. If you cannot articulate your question you are definitely in level 1.
- Survey the whole solution space, go breath first. What are the tools, terms etc. Make a list of them.
- Rephrase you questions, see if you can articulate them based on the stuff you collect in last step. At least, you know what you don’t know.
- Start implementing you first solution by Googling once you reach level 2.
Conclusion
So instead of asking “How to do X in jQueryMobile?”, you might be able to ask:
- What are the differences between jQueryMobile and Bootstrap?
- What’s the best way to handle cross browser/ device?
- How to do BDD in javascript?
- Can I integrate JSLint in my IDE?
