Like The Back Of My Hand

Why should you know things like the back of your hand?

After all, you can find everything you will ever want to know from a quick search on internet. There’s even ChatGPT now you ask it everything and it does a fairly good job answering documentation questions and more.

It comes down to two qualities you want to have: Creativity1 and good habits2

Creativity

You want to master your field well enough so that you can think creatively about it. If you always have to ask someone else (human or robot) ­what to d how are you supposed to come up with original ideas?

This is why as a programmer It’s important for me to be able to recite the GOF Design patterns3, the list of refactorings4 and so on.

Habits

Lifelong Learning is an enabler. As you get smarter, you meet smarter people and give yourself the opportunity to do more things. It gives you more control over your life.

  1. Oakley, B. (2014). A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra). ↩

  2. Professor Brian Harvey on Cheating. https://youtu.be/hMloyp6NI4E ↩

  3. Gamma, E., Helm, R. F., Johnson, R. E., & Vlissides, J. (1994). Design patterns: elements of reusable Object-Oriented software. ↩

  4. Fowler, M. G. (2002). Refactoring: improving the design of existing code. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (p. 256). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45672-4_31 ↩