Best Way to Learn for Self-taught Android developer

Nowadays, you have a lot of free online learning tools to learn Android development, which I highlighted few important resources here.

Of course, there are also the paid online learning tools. Those are very good resources too. The problem is, a lot of them still provide a similar content as the free resources. I did buy these paid online resources such as Udemy course below and e-book (not yet blog about it).

After finished reading them (I did the hands-on too), and I still don't feel I know anything better. Why is that? This is because I what learned does NOT stick.

Reinforce Learning

Reinforce learning is the answer to make your learning stick. Why someone calls you an expert or professional? You're simply repeating your tasks over and over again every day. The nature of the job makes you an expert.

Because a self-taught developer doesn't really have an actual job to reinforce learning, blogging is the best solution here. So I use blogging to reinforce my learning here. I blog when I learn something new. I build an app, I document the challenges that I faced. When I find something tricky to understand, I blog about it.

Besides writing in hashnode platform (which I like most), the other reinforce learning method I do is I cross-post my articles to other platforms such as medium and dev.to.

Every time I repost my articles, I reinforce my learning again. This is how my blogging flow looks like. As you can see, I reinforce my learning at least 3 times! The fourth time is when I refer back to my own articles.

Development References

I usually blog on something that I don't know and make sure it can be used for my future reference. It is kind of like my own development notes.

One good example is adding the app icon, which I don't do it very often. I always refer back to my following article when I'm ready to update my app with a new icon.

Another example is hilt dependency injection, which I'm not familiar because I don't use it very often. If I want to implement it, I always refer back to own blog post below.

I don't know if you have encountered this before - sometimes (maybe very often) I find that I do not even understand my own writing! This tells me that there is room for improvement. Is the article not clear? Or I simply do not understand the topic well enough?

Stay Motivated

Self-learning is hard, especially you want to stay motivated and keep learning. The solution again is blogging. I force myself to publish one article per week. In a way, I force myself to learn new things at least every week.

I also write the article ahead of time, so it doesn't give me pressure to publish it on time. At the time of writing this article, I have a total of 16 future articles. If I stop writing now, my blog can still last for 4 months with one article per week!

Maybe I should change my publishing frequency to twice per week?

Conclusion

Everyone has a different learning style. Blogging definitely works best for me. So far so good for me, and I hope I can keep going. What about you?