Ok, so you’ve seen one of those memory geeks on Johnny Carson (sorry, I’m old, let’s say Jimmy Fallon) that could remember a shuffled deck of cards in less than thirty second using the memory palace technique. When early man painted on cave walls it was not for art but to remember. Our minds have not evolved to remember words and numbers and otherwise the stuff we are expected to learn by rote memory in school. Humans have evolved to remember places, people, smells, and sounds. Loci, by the way, is the latin word for a specific point or position. The technique worked so well that Simon began to memorize poems by visualizing a palace and placing words in visually rememberable spots (memory pegs) of each room. Simon identified the bodies not by sight - they were unrecognizable - but by the location in the various rooms where he had last seen a person. It was discovered in 477 BC by Simonedes, a Greek poet, after he was requested to identify the crushed and mangled bodies in a palace - the roof of which collapsed immediately after he (and maybe Elvis) left the building. The memorization technique Joshua Foer described in “Moonwalking with Einstein” is not, like Angular and Vue, newfangled. I’m putting those seventy-some refactorings in a memory palace. Martin Fowler says of his Refactoring book: “The bulk of the book is around seventy refactorings described in detail: the motivation for doing them, mechanics of how to do them safely and a simple example.” That’s not a book you sit down, consume, and remember. I’m currently employing the Method of Loci in the construction of memory palace for Refactoring, more specifically: The Ruby Edition. I’ve been doing Ruby for six years or so and, to be honest, I don’t remember Ruby-specific idioms because my Rubyish variant of a Groovy, Java, or C++ idiom all too often suffices. My developer idioms have been developed from over 30 years of coding. Sometimes I’ll find out they learned the approach from the same damn book. I have read more books on Ruby than most Ruby devs I’ve worked with, yet, there are times where they’d suggest a technique that I had forgotten. Yeah, I could google but I just need to get the thing done.” But it goes much further than that. I may not even remember which book it was in or if it was a blog post. One of the developers at work asked me what you might be thinking: “ Why would you want to memorize a technical book when you can search your books or google?” I told him: “ Many times I know I’ve read a technique or idiom on a better way to do something but the shadow of that memory is too vague. But, as Bill Gates said: “ Don’t believe anybody who tells you it’s easy,” and “ You have to be very serious about it.” But Why? In this article I will describe how I adapted the strategies illustrated in “Moonwalking with Einstein” for the memorization of a technical book. I have now done that with “Effective Ruby: 48 Specific Ways to Write Better Ruby.” I read and memorized that book in a little over two weeks on about two to three hours a day. I left out that little itty bitty bit because I needed to first prove to myself that I could memorize a tech book, since it seemed like such a daunting task. I wrote about how those books changed my learning strategies in Relearning to Learn but I left out the “Remembering Everything” part. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything “ absolutely phenomenal” and “ one of the most interesting books I’ve read this summer.” I followed Bill’s advice, read it, and then read a half-dozen other books on memory techniques.
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