Seventh entry, I'm feeling lucky. How will my learning journey unfolds to me?
Well, I'll be now posting these learnings every month, starting from the next month, now so I guess it'll be called as "Monthly Resources and
Learnings". It might have a different classification of sorts like I'm going to put the site, channel, and tool of the week into one
category now. IDK, I'll take some time thinking about that.
The reason why I want to make this into a monthly basis is mainly for two reasons:
- I'll have a lot more time to write so I'll be able to write more posts in better quality. This includes my future non-learnings post such as my *Simplified!* series.
- With more time, I'll be able to focus more on learning the more complex stuff on the fields I want to get in (i.e. computer science, electronics, mathematics) as they take more time to understand those topics. This will also affect my time efficiency as I am able to manage my time better.
Having this in a monthly format means I'm now mainly reviewing what I've learned once a month but who says I can only review it once per
month? There are still ways to review it, you know: your ol' paper notebooks, digital notebooks, recalling information once in a while, and
testing yourself which is one of the most effective way to retain information (or at least for me). The only difference is that my notes are
just offline.
Anyways, let's get this seventh entry on the track and kiss the weekly format goodbye.
## What I've learned this week
### More Git
Well, this week I've encountered some problems building my site on GitHub Pages (and eventually move my blog onto a new repo). I've had my
fair share of frustration and self-reminders that I should take this as a challenge because that proves I have little knowledge with this
thing. Anyway, I've learned a bit more about Git. The workflow of a distributed version control system (DVCS), branching, rebasing, and
having your credentials verified since [Git can apparently be used to spoof commits](https://dev.to/agrinman/spoof-a-commit-on-github-from-anyone-4gf4)
making anyone look like that they have contributed into the scene.
Branching is a process on the workflow that flows out from the root / master branch. This is mostly used to make developing new features
more organized and not so much of a chaotic process unlike a sole master branch that carries the burden of being the development repo which
shouldn't be since the master branch should be used as a production code, in some cases. Then those development branches, when the supposed
task is done, is supposed to be pull requested into the master branch. Integrating the code from the dev branch into the master branch and
possibly fix some merge conflicts while at it. Yeah, you can tell that I don't branch out my workflow a lot.
Rebasing, on the other hand, is simply "rewriting" the history of the repo, mostly through its commits. You can erase one of the commits or
squash them all into one commit. Rebasing also affects other files and taking you back into the state of the repo at that time of that commit
so be prepared to fix some merge conflicts.
I'll be a little more mindful when using Git since I have to say that my practice using Git is quite bad. Putting all of the code, whether in
development or not, into the master branch. Also with my practices, it caused some very bad events like not having a complete backup or
restarting back into a valuable point when the code really goes bad and out of control.
### More electronic stuff
I've been digging a lot more about electronics lately that I decided to make a *Simplified!* post out of it. There's still an upcoming part of
the post so keep an eye out for that, not like that I upload very often, anyway.
In that upcoming second part, you'll learn on what electronics is all about and the related concepts that you need to learn in order to get
started: schematics, practical application of the theoretical parts that have been discussed on the first part, and the electronic components
that you'll always see as a budding electrical engineer.
About the meat of the stuff, I've been learning how different electronic components work and basically reviewing the stuff that I passed off
when I was in high school: the diodes, the resistors, the batteries, and all kinds of electrical stuff. I've been also going a bit deeper on
using Arduino wherein I made some basic stuff that is the examples provided in the Arduino IDE. Nothing special in any way but I still think
it's cool. Anyways, a bit of summary for each components:
- *diode* — An electronic component that lets electric charges flow in one direction. The name diode comes the fact that it has two parts, one that is positively charged or the anode which attracts the electrons and the other that is the negatively charged or the cathode which where the electrons will flow out of the component. Since there is different charges for each end, you might encounter to refer these electronic components as polarized where it refers to the distribution of electrons throughout the object but it is still electrically neutral. Also, since it has different charges for those ends, you would have to connect them in a proper way, depending on the flow of the electrons.
- *breadboard* — A tool that lets you build a circuit without permanently soldering them onto a circuit board which is exactly why they are perfect for prototyping, creating, and debugging your circuit. A breadboard is basically just organized metal strips that provides a route for electrons to build your circuit. In a typical breadboard, you would see that there are two parts: the *terminal strip* which is where you usually place your electronic components and it is electrically connected horizontally for each row except at the center, leaving two rows of metal strips per row and the *bus strip* which where you usually use it as the ground and source line, connecting your voltage source to the bus strip and connecting it to your terminal strip in order to make your circuit fully functional.
- *resistor* — An electronic component that reduces the voltage by converting electric energy into heat. Unlike diodes, the resistors is not polarized which means you can connect them in any way and doesn't have two different charges. There are different appearances for the resistor such as the [wirewound resistor]() and the [carbon film]() resistor but normally, you would see the carbon film variation with a group of colored stripes. Those colored stripes indicate the resistance value of the resistor which dictates how much of the current can it resists.
- *capacitor* — It stores the electric charge of the circuit. This is the component that your RAM in the computer relies on by representating the bits through whether the capacitor is filled or not, 0 if mostly empty or 1 if it is not. Anyways, the capacitor is mostly used to introduce time delays for your circuits. When the capacitor is trying to build up charge, that's when the circuit will fully work or something along those lines. The capacitor comes in different types but mostly we categorize them whether it is *polarized* or *non-polarized*. As you've read from the previous items about components with polarity, a polarized capacitor has a positively charged side and negatively charged side, meaning you have to place them in a correct position. Non-polarized capacitors, on the other hand, does not. As a beginner, we mostly fiddle with the non-polarized capacitor since the polarized capacitor is mostly used for the circuits that consumes fairly large values.
- *transistor* — It's basically a wire that blocks or allows electrons to pass through. It has three wires that represent the switch-like function whether the electrons will be blocked or not. Technically, the electrons are "blocked" by letting it flow into the collector, instead, where the electrons just stay there. The way on how it works is that its function will be dictated by the electrical signal. If a signal that tells the transistor to block the upcoming flow, it will rightfully do its duty and block the electrons and instead go to the collector part of the transistor. A transistor's service does not end being a switch-wannabe, it also has another function which is amplifying these electrical signals. This is where the collector part of the transistor will be used as additional energy for the signal. This is what hearing aids relies on: it amplifies sound by recieving these sounds as electrical signals and amplify it from the transistor.
- *integrated circuit* — Integrated circuit or IC, for short, is basically a circuit that is compressed into one tiny chip. This is one of the most important component as they come in different forms and different functions. In order to understand an integrated circuit, you would have to refer to their datasheet which describes the arrangement of the components and the function of different pins as it is one of the ways how you can put some input and get some output.
### [Follow these simple rules and you’ll become a Git and GitHub master by *Ariel Camus*](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/follow-these-simple-rules-and-youll-become-a-git-and-github-master-e1045057468f)
### [Advice For Beginners - Tech Skills, Applying for Jobs, Focus, Imposter Syndrome + More from *Syntax*](https://syntax.fm/show/058/advice-for-beginners-tech-skills-applying-for-jobs-focus-imposter-syndrome-more)
If you have a *lot* of time to watch this 2-hour video, then go ahead and watch this in one gulp or you can go and watch it in sessions just
like what I did. Anyways, this is a video that tackles how our memory works and how it interacts with the different parts of it
subconsciously. I found some parts of the lecture to be discussed on other references on memory, specifically the book, [A Mind For Numbers](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693655-a-mind-for-numbers)
and its associated course at Coursera, [Learning How to Learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/) which I recommend a
