Photo by Hemant Latawa on Unsplash

Six years ago, I wanted to build my own website. So, I did some research and found out that HTML/CSS3, JavaScript, and PHP were the languages I needed to learn to make my dream a reality. So I got books that taught those languages, tackling them like college textbooks, highlighting and trying to grok everything that the authors wrote. By the end, I believed I’d become a bona fide programmer.

What I began to realize, painfully so, was that simply reading from a textbook deluded me into thinking that I was making progress. Sure, reproducing the code examples was easy enough, but getting snippets of code to work is a far cry from solving the day to day problems of coding. There are no helpful hand holds when you actually have to set the environment up yourself. Most answers to questions that you’re going to have will be on Stack Overflow. But I did not have the mindset then that it was okay to break things, ask for help, re-build, and break things again.

I thought I was supposed to know everything after I finished reading a comprehensive book or after completing a codeacademy course. I’d start getting the are we there yet? syndrome halfway through a course, then I’d hop over to the next course. Rinse and repeat. I was that diner at the table who yells at the waiter or waitress, asking,“is the food ready yet?”

This is a mentality I couldn’t shake off till I was entrenched in a 12,000 dollar coding boot camp. During the course, it finally dawned on me that programming isn’t Biology — you don’t have to memorize every function, every bit of markup, or property.

All you need is an understanding of the steps it takes to complete a project. The online sources make up one large cookbook. You use the cookbook to help you solve your problems. Say step 1 in building a website is to set up a file structure. I can refer to the cookbook to find out how this should be done. Problem solved, file it in the memory bank, and move on.

This is what the kitchen vs restaurant mentality is all about.

Throughout our schooling, we’ve been used to getting served our education through homework, classroom lessons, and tutoring. At the end of x amount of years of education, we get served a diploma. We expect to understand everything after we’ve had a standardized learning curriculum dished out to us. The restaurant mentality works if you’re dealing with static theoretical subjects, but many people who get served this type of education realize that it hardly applies to real life.

The kitchen mentality completely shifts the way you go about learning. You set a goal, like the completion of a website, and then you set up a task list. At every step, you search Google/books/etc. for answers to questions, implement the answers, and you move on.

In this way, you’re learning by doing, which, in my opinion, is the best way to learn.