Hi there,
¡Hola de Barcelona! This week, I'm going to attend DrupalCon, the biggest event for Drupal users and businesses in Europe. My hosting company runs this Open Source content management system on hundreds of Linux servers, and I'm going to enjoy meeting customers and learning new things. This week's monologue is about learning, too.

Mentor Monologue

I'm pretty sure that, between you and me, only one is concerned by my glacially slow progress in creating DevOps learning content. This person isn't you, because there is already so much content out there on the net, a good chunk of which is actually of quite good quality. Good for you! However, I'd like you to be aware of the fact that a vast availability of learning materials does not correlate with successful growth. Even though many authors and YouTubers would like you to believe that all you'll have to do to be successful is to consume their content, that's just not how it works.

You can have access to the best articles, videos and books, and you can consume them many times until you're able to quote all their main points from memory, and still be nowhere near what one would consider mastery. The reason that studying really hard alone will never make you a master of a specific topic is that you'll be lacking the analytical and practical components required for effectively growing your skill set.

In his book about learning titled "Make It Stick", Peter C. Brown says:

"However, repeated reading provides the illusion of mastery of the underlying ideas. Don’t let yourself be fooled. The fact that you can repeat the phrases in a text or your lecture notes is no indication that you understand the significance of the precepts they describe, their application, or how they relate to what you already know about the subject."

First-year college students are particularly susceptible to this fallacy. College professors regularly find themselves explaining to a desperate student why they received such a low grade despite attending all the lectures, eagerly taking notes, reading the texts, and diligently highlighting and memorizing the important paragraphs.

A successful learning process involves more than just consuming material. In order to turn any information into something we can apply in practice, we need to first break it down into single parts or ideas. We pull it apart to give insights into the what, why, where, how and who. In systems thinking, this step is called "analysis". We can then go and assemble these pieces and, ideally, other related insights, in new and meaningful ways. The term for this second step is "synthesis".

If you, like me, went down the rabbit hole of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), this might remind you of the more sophisticated way of note-taking many practitioners recommend where you create a whole bunch of independent ("atomic") notes on some topic, and correlate them using links. Later, you can pick up these notes, and assemble their information into an article or presentation. But effective learning goes beyond just finding out things, sorting them into categories and adding metadata such as topic labels.

Taking the component parts of some material and presenting them to yourself (or others) in a clear and orderly fashion doesn't yet create a lot of value. This type of 'explanatory synthesis' will often just result in what's obvious to anyone who reads the same sources. 'Argument synthesis', on the other hand, involves developing and putting forward your own point of view based on the source material. By applying critical thinking and reflection, you'll go beyond just repeating or summarizing what was presented to you.

When I design my courses, I follow a concept from David Kolb who proposed that learning is a process that can be modelled as a continuous cycle. This cycle typically has four stages: 'Concrete experience', 'Reflective Observation', 'Abstract conceptualization', and 'Active experimentation'. First, the learner encounters a new experience or situation. This is where the less successful learners stop, documenting what happened or was said, and calling it a day. But for the more successful ones, there are three --theoretically even infinitely-- more steps.

Those learners go on to reflect on the experience in the light of their existing knowledge. In the 'conceptualization' step, this reflection then gives rise to new ideas or a modification of a previous learning. Finally, the learner applies their ideas in practical experiments to see what happens, expectedly or unexpectedly. The results of these experiments are new 'concrete experiences', and the cycle starts over.

If you really want to grow, you have to do more than just read books, highlight website content, or watch videos. Yes, it requires real effort to break their content down into singular pieces of information, ask questions about them, assemble them into new insights, develop your own point of view on those insights, and put it all to the test in practical experiments. But you simply won't get far just by expecting others to create value for you. The most successful learners take charge of their growth themselves.

I'd love to be part of that journey, which is why I'll end this monologue at this point. You'll find me over there writing course materials.

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My top 5 DevOps book recommendations

My top 5 DevOps book recommendations
In a recent Office Hour (which I hold every Friday on my live streaming channels), a viewer asked about DevOps books. They wanted to know which reads I would recommend to someone freshly entering the DevOps space. I was able to list a few, but couldn't come up with all the ones I find useful on the spot. So I …

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Jochen, the Monospace Mentor
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