Learning things quickly: drinking from the firehose

I started a new gig yesterday. While I can’t talk about the specifics, I can say it’s going to be an interesting one. This will be a very Azure-heavy project, so there are lots of opportunities for me to learn. The manager of the team created an onboarding document for me to follow yesterday, and it has seven areas on it for me to dive in to.

Since there is a lot to learn, I wanted to discuss some of the things I’m going to do to to help control the amount of information coming at me from the firehose they’ve pointed at me. Years ago someone said something that I’ve kept in mind since:

When it comes to the firehose, it’s up to you how close you get.

I’ve always interpreted that to mean that I don’t need to stand with my lips touching the firehose, I can step back a few inches, or maybe even a foot or two to reduce getting knocked on my ass with too much information. That means I can take in a little information, process it, then figure out where to go next while asking myself at each step, “how deep do I really need to go?”

As I said, the manager created an onboarding document - one column of the table is the topic, and the other is for status. I’m currently on the first topic - the one that’s most fundamental to this project. I wrote “in progress” in the status column this morning. He also included some reference links, and I’ve added one so far.

Format

Thankfully when it comes to all things Azure, Microsoft Learn has it covered. There are learning paths and courses for almost everything I need to know for this project. What I like with MS Learn is that it’s easy to skip around, skimming the material as needed along with the benefit of some hands-on labs. The labs are important because it’s one think to read about a thing, it’s another to go through the steps and create something.

Some of the MS Learn pages even have embedded videos which are handy because I can watch the video and then read through the content to reinforce what was said. I’ve also found some resources on YouTube, and I’ll be checking out Pluralsight and maybe Udemy to help fill in any gaps.

I like a combination of written materials and videos, but definitely not videos exclusively. I find taking notes from videos is too time consuming since I have to listen/watch, stop, take notes, restart. It can take 2-3 times as long to get through a video this way. Sure, I can take notes on the fly, but I find it’s harder and I end up missing big chunks of information as I’m focused on writing, not listening.

What I appreciate about written materials is that I have all sorts of options. While I can handwrite notes, I can also copy-and-paste into OneNote or Obsidian. I can also save the links to come back to, AND, if times are desperate, I can also print out an article and highlight things.

Notes

Taking notes is always hard because for as much as I love writing with pen and paper, there are times when taking notes electronically makes more sense; I can pull them up from anywhere, I can search them, and I can easily share them.

Because all of my previous Azure study material for AZ-900/104/204 is on 3x5 index cards, and there is a lot of overlap between the things I’m learning for my client, and the learning I’ve been doing, it makes sense to continue down that road. There is also a lot of research behind how much better information is retained when it’s hand written, BUT is it the right thing to do in this case?

A game changer for me has been my iPad with the Pencil. This allows me to take notes digitally, but also hand write and draw. I tend to take my notes in OneNote on my iPad which makes organization and access really easy. The one downside is that I can’t easily convert the notes to text. For that, I need to open the notes in OneNote for Windows where the functionality to convert my handwritten scribbles to text is available. Maybe they’ll make that feature work in the Apple versions.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I really want to like Obsidian, but I also don’t like having notes scattered across different apps and since Obsidian doesn’t support “writing” with the Pencil, it’s only good for typed notes. I could probably take screenshots and import them that say, but that seems gross. The appealing thing is that I if I’m going to type my notes, I can type them in markdown.

For this particular onboarding session, I’m going to use my iPad and OneNote so I can continue to hand write things.

Bringing it together

Taking notes after reading articles or watching videos is great, but the key is to revisit the information. You can’t just write something down once and expect it to stick. One of the reasons I like using index cards is that it’s not difficult to use them as flash cards to review the information.

There are some great apps for creating flashcards like Anki which has versions for the web, Mac/iPhone, Windows, and Android. Anki specifically uses something called spaced repetition to help learn.

From the Wikipedia article:

Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards. Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect. The use of spaced repetition has been proven to increase the rate of learning.

Even if I don’t use Anki, I’ll still review the notes I take. I’m sure I’ll even leave some of the learning tabs open just so I can refer back to them until I’m fully comfortable with things.

Final Thoughts

I’m not letting the amount of things I need to learn overwhelm me. I’ve got a great onboarding document to guide me, so I’ll start at the 50k foot view of each topic, taking notes I think are relevant, and then drill in as needed. I have to remember, I’m not studying for an exam, but I do need to have a firm grasp on all the topics, so as long as I have something I can quickly refer back to, I think it’ll be fine.

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