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The Benefits of Incremental Learning in Software Development

Consistency in doing anything is difficult. Performing self-directed tasks consistently seems impossible. Combine this fact with the negative connotations and emotions the majority of the modern world harbors towards studying and you have a large enough problem to prevent most people from learning new things.

What if there was a way short-circuit the negative emotions arising from studying? An easy way to both circumnavigate study-hate and give you the ability to learn at a faster rate than traditional methods? A method of learning that, after extended use and self-directed optimization of your learning progress and goals, can save you thousands of dollars on classes while turning the entire learning experience into one that is MUCH more fun, thus making it easier to be persisted.

You might think this sounds crazy, or dismiss these claims as simple marketing. I can understand these misgivings. If you tole me the same pitch to ten years ago, I probably would also think this is talk from someone who is trying to sell me something..

However, the person I have become knows the method to be true. The current me, a software engineer that in 4 years has been able to change from someone who quit his first programming job because he just didn’t “get” it to negotiating a paycheck much higher than he could imagine was reasonable at one of the top 30 software companies in the world.

The current me knows there is a better method to study. A way that not only is scientifically and statistically proven to work better, but, when used properly, can also reignite the love of learning the majority of us lose through schooling.

This method of study is Incremental Learning.

The effectiveness, and maybe even the motivation, of Incremental Learning can be modeled on the bored flipping of television channels.

The simple act of flipping television channels is a behavioral expression of the search for novelty, a trait that our brains are automatically wired to possess — a trait that has been bred into us for millions of years.

Whether this novelty occurs in choosing interesting-looking youtube recommended videos or television channels, in choosing mates or even trying to decide what to eat, pathways in the mind are motivating us to seek out and understand novelty in our environment. We explore a novelty space, discover things about the environment, and, after learning a specific amount of information about it, ultimately feel bored. We then take the knowledge we have and seek out more novel experiences, either in the same space or another.

Our brains are extremely accomplished at making generalizations out of the pieces of knowledge we are fed on a daily basis. One of the mechanisms behind continuing to seek out these pieces of knowledge stems from a large dose of positive chemicals that encourage us to continue seeking novelty when we make these connections. A child that throws items in the air and watches them fall down will eventually generalize the concept of gravity (even if they don’t quite have the words for what that means). Adults may read the news and absorb certain pieces of information and view the world differently after a period of time. Each generalization is a result of knowledge gained through signal novelty and each one is equally valuable to the brain.

Information that lies within a specific threshold of understanding, one that is close enough to feel familiar but still far enough away to pique our interest, is prime for our consumption and appears the most attractive to us. Many of us seek out this experience at all cost, sometimes to the detriment of other tasks and neglect of other information sources.

The idea of novelty and generalization can also can explain why we all performed at different levels in different classes during formal education. If you had a keen interest in math, you probably spent more time learning about the subject and thus built a strong foundation. If you were someone with this solid foundation, the topic of limits in your 10th grade calculus class might have been one of the most interesting thing in the world at the time.

However, if you struggled with exponents in your Algebra 1 class — if you never felt you “got Math” and subsequently never put any effort in the pursuit of learning it, that same topic in 10th grade calculus could have been the greatest torture in the world. Limits were beyond the “sweet spot” of building on just enough knowledge of what you knew while still providing the newness factor of the signal to make it interesting. Each of us has a jigsaw puzzle of information in our brain, some piece are shared, and some are unique. Your career, scholastic, and creative performance is based on the knowledge contained in this puzzle. And your interests can wax and wane based on what pieces are maintained and contained inside it.

Now imagine there was a method of learning and studying that can mimic flipping television channels — a way for you to maximize the amount of time you spend in the “sweet spot” of understanding and novelty.

Imagine there was a tool that allows you to import articles and study materials of any topic, slowly and enjoyably process them into engrams (a unit of measure of one specific knowledge chunk), and review those engrams of information to 90% total accuracy.

Using this method you could remember these chunks of information until you:

All of the above can be accomplished with Incremental Learning.

So if you’ve read to this point you are probably either sold on the idea of Incremental Learning, or at least interested.

Now the real question as engineers should be, How do we get started learning software with Incremental Reading?

Well, like any software learning endeavor, the entire habit is built upon building lots of things.

As an engineer, it is direly important that you literally and figuratively build your future.

Whether it be building apps at your current job, building websites at home, or writing build code for a cloud platform like AWS, put your software skills to use and build things you want to see exist.

The reason for this is Only when you are building things will you start to find the gaps in your knowledge.

Gaps in knowledge of syntax. Gaps in knowledge of concepts. Maybe a lack of knowledge of tools. The resolution of these gaps in understanding make up the core part of what a software engineer’s job is these days: to learn technology.

Incremental Learning will fill those gaps. The process of filling these gaps will expose new gaps in your understanding. Once you have started to fill the gaps you face in your mental models, it will become more obvious what you need to know and how to learn it. Your learning and motivation will be a virtuous cycle, one that results in you becoming a better developer and a happier person.

Encounter gaps and find the relevant blog articles, stack overflow responses, and other posts and pieces of documentation and add them to your Incremental Learning process. As you do your reviews, read through an article until you either find an important piece of information or feel bored and execute one of the following actions:

Then schedule the next interval of the card and jump to something else. Feel comfort in knowing that the algorithm will bring that article back for you to read later, when you are in a different state of mind and can take a different action on it next time.

To quote the Showtime Rotisserie commercials from my youth, with Incremental Learning you can “set it and forget it”. As long as you master the hump of returning to your reviews each day, you will see enough of your articles to slowly formulate them into concrete knowledge and remember up to 95% of the most important parts of what you choose to learn.

More Learning, Less Stress

After you have been learning using this method of learning for a time, you will realize how little stress the learning process can entail. Incremental Learning brings a strong feeling of security to all of your learning endeavors. The feeling of security in knowing you will not lose this article if you click away.

If you don’t feel like you have enough context on a topic to really understand what you’re reading? Give it a new priority and move on.

If you start to feel bored with a certain topic? Mark where you left off, maybe give it a new priority, and move on to the next one.

It’s crazy to think that an act as natural and entertaining as flipping channels can be applied to reading and learning topics that can influence your life and your career. Learning technologies you can put on your resume can actually be fun, and it is much more useful than watching previews for the most recent Rock movie or seeing who was voted the hottest couple in 2018.

Learning for Life

Before Incremental Reading, when I would research a topic or look something up, I found I would rarely remember anything but the most salient information in the following couple of days. After a month, I had forgotten most of what I learned on any given day.

After starting to learn through Incremental Leanring, my knowledge has been able to compound quickly. Not only am I able to record and remember many mistakes I make that I find valuable to never forget, but I’m also able to look up concepts mentioned at work in detail and learn many software systems and design decisions all the way down to the theory level.

A great metaphor I picked up from a language learning blog views your memory as a single file in your file directory. With Incremental Reading, instead of overwriting the file each time you start to learn something new (and important), you can append to it. All the while enjoying the associative benefits of being able to compare a multitude of concepts and principles.

You can filter out information deemed undesirable and focus on acquiring knowledge that is applicable to what you are currently working on and what you are interested in. Incremental Learning allows you to forget about forgetting and focus on a more important problem: deciding what knowledge will benefit your life the most!

As great as it is, the Incremental Learning process doesn’t come without cost. Learning to Incrementally Learn is not a particularly difficult process, but there are some road bumps along the way which may deter you from continuing.

With using any type of mass learning, it is easy to get overwhelmed. The feelings of excitement that accompany the realization that you can learn anything you want may motivate you to add too many new items to your learning process than your schedule permits. Building a massive amount of knowledge takes time, and the nature of memory and the human brain results in the best time to review a piece of information is right before you forget it. If you are not used to the Incremental Learning process and add too much at one time, the amount of reviews required to maintain the new information may prove to be too much. A succinct rule I follow is: no matter how many cards I added today, the ultimate goal of each day is to finish all reviews.

Although not finishing your reviews each day and reviewing a portion of your daily workload probably works better than traditional learning, it is much more productive to add less cards and ensure you finish your daily reviews.

Every day you complete your reviews, you are solidifying a subset of material that lies on the edge of your memory — material you are about to forget. The elements that show up in your queue each day will be the most difficult pieces of knowledge for your brain to recall.

Active review of material requires a lot of cognitive energy. Thus if you add too many cards, you will have a LOT of things to review each day and may begin to feel yourself slipping.

It is easy to become buried in the Incremental Review process. Like any life changes on a large scale, take it slow in the beginning and you will eventually feel yourself growing smarter. After you have mastered an easier daily workload, you can start to increase the load and begin to learn at a greater rate.

You might not feel the benefits of Incremental Reading right away. As mentioned before, our brains are naturally driven by novelty, and the constant search for this in the present moment makes it so that we are not great at predicting which aspects of our lives will result in the best long-term results. Incremental learning is delayed gratification, so it often feels you are not making progress in your learning when you actually are.

Only after a significant amount of time (probably in the range of months) will you just begin to feel the benefits of Incremental Learning in your life. Be like the farmer, and keep on sowing. Trust that the harvest will come in season — with proper care and nutrition, it will grow on its own.

For many of us, learning might not feel synonymous with fun. It is easy to add a sundry of cards to the Incremental Learning process because you feel the information is stuff that you SHOULD know, even if it doesn’t pique your interest.

One of the main benefits of Incremental Learning is that it has the capability to reignite your passion for learning. This re-introduction to the love of learning can enable you to accomplish feats you never thought possible and allow you to learn many concepts you may have learned before, but are now forgotten. But you must be good to yourself — take care of your health, mental and physical, and keep your own enjoyment in mind throughout the whole process.

If you find yourself not enjoying Incremental Learning, delete some material that you feel is holding you back, add some material that might just be for fun, and incrementally take your learning process back.

Even the learning of information deemed “useless” can bleed over into more useful information. Follow your passions, and never give up.

Keep learning, reading important and/or fun articles, and formulating knowledge cards.

The results will come.

In order of ease of read:

(Most dense and thorough analysis of Incremental Learning from the creator: Piotr Wozniak):

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