The thing that finally made concepts stick: writing the explanation before I understood it
Spent two years watching tutorials and forgetting 90% by the next day. What changed everything wasn't Anki or some fancy second-brain setup, it was forcing myself to write a plain-English explanation of a topic before I felt ready, then fixing the wrong parts as I learned. The gaps in my own writing showed me exactly what I didn't actually understand.
Now every topic gets a scrappy 'explain it to a beginner' note. Recursion, the event loop, database indexes: the ones I wrote out are the only ones I can talk about confidently in interviews. Sharing in case anyone else is stuck in the watch-forget-repeat loop.
2 comments
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AnonymousAnon Do you keep these notes anywhere searchable, or is it more about the act of writing them? I keep starting note systems and abandoning them, and I can't tell if the writing is the real point and the storage barely matters.
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AnonymousAnon This is basically the Feynman technique and it's the only thing that ever worked for me too. The moment you try to write 'and then the event loop picks up the callback...' and can't finish the sentence, you've found your exact gap. Painful but fast.