An Introduction

You may or may not know me from Monday Morning Haskell where I've been writing about a programming language called Haskell for about five years now. But I've been wanting to branch out a bit and try some new things in addition to my programming work. So today I'm excited to announce this new project: Monday Morning Learning!

I think this project started out as a desire to stream myself playing chess since chess has gotten a lot more popular in the last year or two and I used to play chess competitively as a kid. But even beyond that I've always been wanting to study the process of learning itself. I've read a lot about this process including several books and I've always been eager to really develop my own framework using all these ideas and then apply that framework to a bunch of different things. It sounds a little weird when I phrase it like this, but I just like getting good at things.

So on this blog page (and this YouTube channel) I'm going to record my journey of trying out a lot of different skills and trying to develop a systematic framework for how to learn more quickly. I have a variety of different skills that are on my list to try already. Some of these skills are things I am completely new to. Like I've always wanted to learn how to play Go, or how to play the guitar. But there are also several skills that I developed pretty well in my life so far, and I want to explore how I would systematically take those to the next level. For one example I'm eventually going to talk about programming on this channel as well. I'm a professional software engineer but I'm always looking to try to get better.

But the main thing I'm going to be starting with is chess. I was a pretty strong school-level player when I was young, but I haven't really played in a tournament in probably at least 8 years or so while I've been an adult. I was never a prodigy or anything, so these days I'm pretty average or maybe a little above average. But I want to see if I can apply a systematic process to really improve my skills in a noticeable and measurable way. I think chess is a good starting point for studying the learning process because I can reflect back on my younger days and I know where I messed up in my development and the areas I should have focused on more.

So for the first few months of 2021, you're going to see a lot of chess-related content on this site. You can also catch me playing chess on my Twitch stream, so come say hi there.

But most importantly I hope this channel will inspire you to learn those things you've always been wanting to learn. I hope I'll be able to teach you some ways to improve your process over the course of the year. If you don't want to wait for my videos, if you just want to jump in and see what my process looks like at a high level, then you can download my Learning checklist. This checklist will provide you with an overview of the principles I think are really important when you're learning anything and a few concrete ways you can apply those principles.

It'll also reference some of the books and videos I've used to help inform my own learning process. These are great resources, but I hope this page will be distinct from those in that I'll really be showing myself from start to finish with a variety of different skills, so you can really see the whole process, including the good and the bad, so I hope you find it interesting.

So thanks for reading and I hope to see you next Monday and really every Monday morning this year when I'll be posting new articles!

If you want to see this post in the "video" version, here it is!