Oh look, another wonderful post by Julia Evans, this time about “Celebrate tiny learning milestones”. In this post she explains how she thinks about her learning process as a series of tiny challenges, where learning happens one little discovery at a time.

I think this is a really wonderful way to think about discovery. In fact, my own process of learning and discovery feels much better when I focus on tiny things that I can do and get excited about: writing a small bot, or a script to automate something I care about. Huge goals tend to settle and stick at my TODO lists for years. But even when I look back at my blog, my most active and interesting posting periods where during a time when I was having an interactive process of discovery.

Unfortunately, though, it seems that I’ve gotten really bad at tackling these tiny projects. I need to figure out why this is happening, and hack myself back into doing those. It might have to do with burnout at work, or maybe I’m losing a bit of my ability to multi-task. I need more introspection about that.

Anyway, if you do read that blog post (and you should), do read the link at the end for the other blog post about “brag documents”. That is really good too!