Nineteen: Learning with Trial by Fire

I have chronicled in past blog posts some events that have not gone my way. Take, for example, wiping my hard drive while trying to dual boot Arch.

Yes, I have made many mistakes in my computing career (?), only a few of which I have posted on my blog; however, I am certain that I would not know what I know today if I had not made consistent mistakes that had costed me. This leads me to my belief in trial by fire.

Maybe this is stockholm-syndrome-esque since I don’t really have a choice, but I have determined that the best way for me to learn in the computing space is by trying blindly and getting the details later. In other words, a sort of computing trial by fire. As I said before, I may only like this way of doing things because I refuse to look into something before I try it out. I don’t want to waste time (?) learning about something before I actually do it, so I inevitably make mistakes and fix them. Only then do I look into man pages or books or online tutorials to learn more. I love learning the hard way – trial by fire – because it’s all I know how to do!

I realized the efficiency of trial by fire recently. I picked up a book, How Linux Works, from No Starch Press online. I wanted to learn more about the inner workings of the operating system and kernel, so I decided to start reading. When I got to the filesystem part, reading about mounting, filesystem types, fstab, partitions, etc., I realized that I knew >80% of the information that was being given to me already! I learned it via trial by fire, with the plethora of issues I had already encountered in filesystems in Linux. Frankly, I don’t really like reading books (that is starting to change) and I think I learn less from them because I get bored, so I believe that the overview of things I already knew was certainly contributing to my overall learning. Now I was able to use my baseline of knowledge and patch the cracks here and there (i.e. ‘mount’ has long options such as ’noexec’ and ’nosuid’ – interesting! I didn’t know that!).

Trial by fire is, in my opinion, the best way to learn in the computing space, even if it does also cause the most pain. I really believe that without the risk and reality of things going terribly wrong, you can’t learn a topic quite as well. Books cannot give that risk, but they do certainly have great information to get acquainted with after you set everything on fire.