<story><title>The need for tooling and the need for mastering your tools</title><url>http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/master-your-tools.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>accidentalrebel</author><text>The tool for me that I have spent a lot of time learning and improving is my Emacs environment.&lt;p&gt;It wasn&amp;#x27;t easy but as soon as I got the hang of things I was able to improve a lot in terms of overall productivity. Knowing how to debug when things go wrong and where to look to solve it was the first step in my learning journey. I eventually started heavily customizing by making scripts and packages to further suit my needs.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; After you master a tool, you internalize it and go minimalist, and reduce it to first principles.
This line made me feel like I&amp;#x27;m on the right track. Just recently I&amp;#x27;ve cleared up the fluff in my emacs config leaving only simple but effective and essential tools. I realized that I&amp;#x27;ve made a lot of edits to my config and that each one taught me something that eventually led to where i am now. In a way, clearing things out was a learning experience in itself.&lt;p&gt;I still have a lot to learn though. Just recently I&amp;#x27;ve made a jump to reading the enacs source and even took the time to contribute to Remacs, a Rust port of Emacs. I&amp;#x27;ll admit that this one is a bit overwhelming and may even seem overdoing it, but it is still a fun learning experience.&lt;p&gt;I sure do love my tool.</text></comment>
<story><title>The need for tooling and the need for mastering your tools</title><url>http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/master-your-tools.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacobolus</author><text>This is the main reason I am ambivalent about the typical school (even the best ones I know about, and from first grade up through the undergraduate level). Compared to the amount of time spent, relatively little is focused on mastering all of the metacognitive skills required for expert problem solving in any domain. Almost all work is done at the shallowest surface level with shallow delayed feedback and an overemphasis on punishing minor errors or non-standard output formatting, and on judging&amp;#x2F;ranking the students. There is a parade of &amp;#x27;content&amp;#x27; to get through, but little chance for students to work on problems which are truly difficult (for the student at their current level, e.g. taking more than a few hours to figure out a single problem) or larger-scale projects of personal interest. Very seldom is the work revisited or iterated. Ideas and methods from one discipline are seldom applied to another. Students are systematically discouraged from taking any kind of risk. (This is not primarily the fault of individual educators: scaling close personal attention from experts is just uneconomical given current societal resources available for education, and schools have many difficult constraints on pedagogy.)</text></comment>