Tuesdays are always a busy day. We typically code on a Ruby project for much of the day before coming back to focus on Javascript from 6:30PM to 9ish. Today ended up being a little different and was more low-key. This week is going to be heavily focused on databases and instead of coding for much of the day, we instead spent the time understanding how to construct databases at a high-level by creating sample database schema based off different requirements provided to us by the instructors. By the end of the day, I was feeling pretty comfortable with the one-to-many and many-to-many relationship styles between different database tables.

Even more interesting today was an optional talk given at lunch by a learning scientist, Adam Lupu of the Code Academy. Adam focuses specifically on the learning process for new programmers, but most of what he said could be applied to learning in general.

Here were a few of my take-aways:

• Learning tightly related to our identity. We are the sum of what we’ve learned and each new thing we learn relies on this.
• We have three modes of learning:

1. What you’ve built and what you’ve done
2. Learn and identify from the people that we interact around us. We pick up the habits and mindset of the people around us both intentionally and unintentionally.
3. Using past knowledge to leverage learning of new new things. You must be able to somehow connect past learning with this new piece of knowledge in order to fully learn it.

• Find patterns that help you abstract understanding of complex processes whenever possible. The human brain is much better at understanding things at a higher level and then remembering smaller details rather than trying to simply memorize small steps in a process.
• View mentorship as an opportunity to learn from your mentor’s workflow, coding style and method of solving problems. It’s more valuable to see how they code ultimately than hearing how they got to where they are now.
• And my favorite recommendation… naps are good for learning! Naps of 20 – 90 minutes can significantly boost productivity and learning for the remainder of the day.

That’s it for now. More on databases coming straight to you tomorrow.