FightinJoe : Aaron Wheeler

Apples and Oranges

Sunday, 13 April 2008

Never stop learning, or so they say. With the cost of a post-graduate degree or returning for a higher education, they might as well say “never stop paying for student loans.”

When schooling was public, learning was easy. Once graduated, it doesn’t come so easy. First, it requires a proactive attitude. Next, it requires some discrimination to find good teachers; i.e. CNN and Fox News aren’t exactly ideal teachers. Finally, it requires a lot of patience.

I’ve been trying to pick up a few new skills recently, most of which run parallel to my line of work – web app development. The problem is that while I have a generic knowledge base regarding programming, on top of that I have very specific knowledge of my preferred programming language and web framework. When shifting to a different language or framework, I don’t need to rebuild my base – I just need to translate my specific knowledge.

Learning many things is like this. If experience is the best teacher, being able to relate new knowledge to previous experience has to be a second-best option. In this vein, I’m trying something new – I’m trying to collect knowledge I have, and then as I learn new things, I want to what I know into what I learned.

Thus, I’ve spawned Vs., a web app that is supposed to make comparisons easy. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s given me quite a few opportunities to play with different design ideas, new programming tools and techniques, and unique attitudes towards learning.

Right now the site is clearly only serving one person – myself. It’s available for public viewing, but closed for contribution. My hope is that I can open it up in the near future for anyone to use.

It would be cool to use the site for things like comparing languages, or even dialects of the same language; for comparing products, foods, recipes; for comparing theories, philosophies, etc.

So with that goal in mind, what do you want to compare? Is the project worthwhile? Can this be a better way to learn, or just another silly web app?

Comments

  • Apr23
    Josh Murphy Well, I want to compare competing political candidates without all of the opinion & sound bite & slant (your CNN & FOXnews mention reminded me what I most recently am disillusioned with them over, political coverage). I just want to keep track of the "facts" (platforms, foibles, lies, stunts, experiences, etc.) in a side-by-side "pro vs con" manner. Whatcha think? P.S. I would have posted this semi-sarcastic suggestion much earlier, but I just realized that I needed to re-subscribe to your re-written blog to start getting new posts.

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