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The Scrimba Podcast

Be a Librarian, Not an Encyclopedia of Code: How To Learn (and Teach) Better, With Guil Hernandez

🎙 About the episode


Meet Guil Hernandez 🇺🇸! You've heard of a learning curve, but what about the forgetting curve? Don't worry, Guil can help you not get overwhelmed. He is a developer and educator with over 15 years of experience in tech, and in this episode, he teaches you how to get better at learning. Guil and Alex also talk about Scrimba Bootcamp, a brand new study program that Guil has been working on.

Guil has developed over one hundred coding courses and workshops and comes from a teaching environment, so he also answers the dreaded question of what makes a good teacher. You'll also learn different learning techniques that might work for you, what's the Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve, and what it was like to make stuff for the web back in the early days of Web 2.0. Alex and Guil also discuss scopes, structure, and the importance of storytelling in teaching, as well as why you won't vibe with every YouTube tutorial out there... but you might still want to learn from multiple sources.

🔗 Connect with Guil

⏰ Timestamps

  • How Guil got into coding (01:18)
  • Web development in the early days of Web 2.0 (03:02)
  • Do you need a computer science degree to consider yourself a developer? (04:50)
  • How Guil became a teacher (06:17)
  • What makes a good teacher (07:18)
  • The science of learning (10:38)
  • What's the forgetting curve, and what you can do about it (11:54)
  • How to not make a learning process overwhelming (14:07)
  • Learning techniques that work for Guil: Scheduling study time, Pomodoro technique, Keeping a study log (16:15)
  • Scrimba now has Solo projects: What are they, and how can they help you learn better? (20:32)
  • What is Scrimba Bootcamp and the benefits of code reviews and getting feedback (25:24)
  • Quick-fire questions: Code editors, coding music, Web 3.0, and Puerto Rico (27:48)
  • Closing advice: be a librarian, not an encyclopedia 


🧰 Resources mentioned

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