Learn your tools

I've been helping my kid learn algebra by following a course.

This week she asked for help with a part that used a graphing calculator. This was odd because even after four years of high school math and a couple of years in collage math, I never used a graphing calculator (only scientific and business calculators before moving on to spreadsheets).

For graphing we learned to do it by hand which helped me understand how to create the lines (rise over run).

But this algebra course spent time early on to go deep into using the calculator. Going into some advanced topics right away. A bit prematurely I think.

Calculators are tools. Great tools. But you have to first understand how things work before using a tool. Otherwise the tool will seem like magic, you'll never learn more, and when the tool has problems you won't be able to fix them.

Take something simple like showing an image on your Shopify store. Something that probably happens 1,000s to 1,000,000s of times per day in your store alone. If all of a sudden it stops working in your store and you don't know how HTML, HTTP, and Internet tech works then you'll have to talk to Shopify chat. Hours later and they might have given you an idea on fixing it or be told to hire someone to help.

Say you understand a bit more of that tool (Shopify). You know Shopify creates the HTML page, which includes an <img> tag that has a url to your image, and that image url is just a file on Shopify's servers. Now you can debug a variety of problems.

Now you're never going to be able to know everything. It would be silly to expect you to know how to inspect the raw TCP packets to make sure they are all coming back from Shopify to debug a missing image. But knowing your tools even a little bit more can make it easier to understand what they are doing.

For my kid's algebra that means learning:

For Shopify that might mean learning:

One tip I learned years ago when I got started programming was:

Learn things one or two layers above and below where you work regularly

This means if your day-to-day is focused on managing product pages on Shopify, you should learn a lot about how that activity interacts with your Shopify theme:

Then down:

There's a lot here but you can take your time with it. Learn little bits at a time, especially if you've ran into problems in an area. Many of these skills will transfer, even if you move off of Shopify.

Tools are a great thing, especially when you're busy. Over-reliance on tools will make you dependent which will cause problems.

Eric Davis

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Topics: Learning

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