Learning
How I Keep Myself Studying Every Day
No syllabus, mostly video across five lanes I keep circling, and a habit of noticing when I've fallen down a SaaS rabbit hole instead of studying what I sat down for.
My daily study habit isn't built around a course or a syllabus, at least not most days. It's mostly video, as much of it as I can fit into a day, spread across a specific handful of subjects: SaaS and product content, .NET, Angular, system design, and interview prep. No single source, just whatever's next in whichever of those five lanes I'm circling that day.
The rabbit hole I keep falling into
One thing I've noticed about myself: I'll sit down to watch something technical, .NET or Angular usually, and somewhere in the middle of it I get pulled sideways into a completely different SaaS idea or product someone's showing off. Before I notice, I'm thirty minutes into a video about someone's indie SaaS instead of the thing I actually opened my laptop to study. It happens more than I'd like to admit, and I still haven't fully solved it. I just try to notice it faster now.
Two types of people I keep noticing
Watching that much content across that many creators, a pattern started showing up. Some people are courageous, not particularly technical, and they just build and ship things anyway. They don't wait until they understand the architecture properly. They get something out into the world and fix it as they go. Other people go the opposite direction: deeply technical, understand everything under the hood, and never actually ship anything, because there's always one more thing to learn first before they'll call something ready.
Where I try to sit
I want to be somewhere in between those two. Technical enough that what I build actually holds up under real use, but not so deep into the technical side that I never finish anything. Most of my daily study time is really an attempt to stay in that middle ground: reading and watching SaaS content for the product thinking side of it, .NET and Angular because that's the actual stack I build with, system design for the bigger picture beyond a single feature, and interview content because that's the thing that actually gets me in the door for a role.
Why this counts as studying every day
None of this feels like sitting down with a textbook, and some days it's just watching videos back to back with nothing built at the end of it. But it keeps me in contact with the subject every single day, even on the days I don't write a line of code, and that daily contact is the part that actually compounds. A missed textbook chapter is easy to catch up on later. A habit you let slip for a week is a lot harder to pick back up, and I already know that from experience.