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.