Balanced Learning

            As I’ve been progressing through learning to code, I’ve been working my way through a lot of tutorials. The trouble with tutorials is that, while they’re great for showing you how to do certain things, a lot of your time is spent following along and just copying the work you’re already being shown. Yes, you’re usually being told why you’re doing each of the steps, but when your goal is learning, how do you know if you’re actually retaining that information?

            It’s a challenging prospect, especially if you pick things up fairly quickly, to figure out if you’re actually learning. Being self-taught, there (usually) aren’t any tests to take, so I have to find a way to measure my own success. So, the first method I came up with for proving to myself I was actually learning was to skip ahead of the tutorial. I’d pause in the middle of an instruction to finish writing the code the way I though it should be – it was very rewarding when I got it right, and when it was wrong I felt I’d learned more – because I now had a comparison of two different ways of approaching a problem, and that gave me more information than simply being told how to do it right.

            More recently, I moved on to playing with designing some of my own projects. This is very challenging because, unlike tutorials, there’s nothing there to teach the right way to do things, and unlike with proper tests, there’s no way of knowing if you even have the skills to accomplish what you want. I knew this going in, but I found one additional unexpected challenge – my own desire to learn.

            The important thing to know about programming is that there is a lot of code that has already been written – either built into the language, or that other people have written for their own projects. Just about anything you want to do, someone has either done, or has done something similar enough that you can make minor changes to their code to make it work.

            But, I want to learn and prove to myself that I can figure out how to solve the problems on my own. Yet, there’s no reason I should re-invent the wheel, especially when it’s already built into the language, just so I can say I did it. On the other hand, it’s an excellent exercise for testing my capabilities.

            In the end, it comes down to finding a balance between using what’s available and writing my own functionalities. The important part, after all, is getting the code effectively and efficiently written – and it’s just as important to learn how to look up code for things I don’t know how to do as it is to learn how to do it myself.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Writers and their Characters

            Writers, by necessity, must have a very complicated relationship with their characters. It’s not as simple as creating them and then throwing them in the story. No, you have to care about them and hate them at the same time.

            You see, it’s essential for a writer to care about their characters. If the writer doesn’t care about the character, neither will the reader. It shows in the writing. Oh, there are ways to make it look like you care about a character when you don’t, but they are contrived and lessen the reader’s connection to the story. Actually caring is the only way to organically transfer the feeling into the writing.

            That said, if the writer cares too much, it creates another problem. It makes the plot fall short, because the writer isn’t willing to have (as) bad things happen to their characters. The character also tends to have less flaws. The result is that the character strolls through their trials with ease, never truly losing anything, never being forced to make a difficult decision.

            The solution is that the writer must hate their character with a fiery burning passion. Feeding on that hatred, the writer can throw obstacle after obstacle at their character, laughing maniacally all the way. The character will make mistakes and lose friends, precious possessions, limbs, or even their lives. And the story will be interesting.

            However, if the writer hates the character too much, then the character will lose their depth and the reader won’t be able to connect. If the character becomes nothing more than a bland punching bag, waiting for the next blow to fall, the reader will lose interest and likely walk away. So, the writer must care deeply about the character.

            It’s all about balance. You need to be able to care about the character so much that is shows through in the writing, while hating them so much that you can put them through the worst ordeals of their lives. You must be able to cry as their souls are crushed, even as you’re squeezing tighter.

            A writer must have a relationship with their characters worthy of writing a story about.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.