I’m familiar with some mnemonic/memorization techniques for about a year.
I think that this techniques can give a developer significant benefit or even make you an expert in the field.
If you are familiar with this techniques, you know that there are mnemonic techniques for long-term memorizing. We often read lots of books, and there are many concepts which you don’t remember because they won’t appear often in your daily coding-life. So, you need to learn it again and again, months and years later.
The same situation with frameworks. It takes some time to become familiar with framework’s syntax, useful code constructs and so on. But after some time you forget many concepts from your previous framework(or framework which you rarely use – but it is very important to you).
By using this techniques you can build with time your sustainable knowledge base, which will reliably grow – you can be confident that after some time you won’t forget about the concepts you learned earlier.
Please tell me what do you think about this idea?
You are already familiar with Mnemonics techniques, please tell about your experience – it will be very useful and interesting to hear.
Useful links:
I read Harry Lorrayne’s “The Memory Book” a few years ago, and found that the techniques therein were great for remembering related facts. However, in my experience I the techniques could have been more useful, namely:
The memorization didn’t tend to work in the long run. If I wasn’t practicing remembering a particular list, or body of facts, I would eventually completely forget them within a few days or weeks.
I had trouble applying the techniques to hierarchical data sets, like class libraries. This made their use less powerful for programming stuff.
The techniques were very useful for things that could be easily explained by voice, or a single stream of text. However, I had trouble applying them to things of a more visual nature, such as mathematical equations.
That said, I have used Mnumonic Techniques while coding for things that google could not replace. I sometimes use the number memorization trick to recall a specific line of code (by its line number) while I jump around a code file, or remember function names as I jump between files.