Having a family definitely slows down the long nights going through an online course and digesting everything. Back in the bachelor life I could spend the entire weekend going through some course.

Now though, the kids are doing things, I am spending time with my wife, lawn care has to happen. All of this takes up time that in my single life would have been used for online learning. This means the courses take a lot longer to complete.

There is an upside to it that though. By doing a course spread of weeks instead of days, it re-enforces the concepts you learn. In this particular case, I am going through a Ruby on Rails course. By not being able to burn through it, it’s easier to retain the Ruby language and concepts of Rails.

It reminds me of when I learned to SCUBA dive. If you go on a nice Caribbean vacation, you can find places that will teach you to SCUBA dive in a weekend. If you take an 8 week course, you are much more comfortable putting the gear together as you have done it week after week. The weekend places, you do it 2 maybe 3 times, but come 6 months from now when you go diving again, that uncertainty of not remembering just how everything goes.

So in a few more weeks, when I am able to finish this course, I hope to be able to retain most of what I learned and start working on Ruby projects comfortably. The hard part of learning a new programming language is it’s so much faster to just use the language I am already proficient it.