Lately, I’ve been noticing more and more often that focused attention and a conscious effort to really understand something are truly rewarded when it comes to reading just about anything. So often I stumble upon a peace of documentation looking for something specific that is “probably there somewhere if I just scroll down more”.

What usually happens is I find what I’m looking for and leave the page immediately. What only seldom happens is I remind myself to be patient, start reading from the beginning and learn something very valuable and generally usable. It’s almost always like “ha, I found the ripest piece of all the fruit on this tree, well done, let’s leave” when what atually happened is I just walked past baskets of beautiful, ripe fruit, prepared with care, free, there for the taking.

Things like how to frame a certain topic or a question. Or what the right way is to think about a certain problem space and how professionals working in the field think about it. A good example is reading MySql or PostgreSQL documentation. I always learn something I wasn’t looking for when visiting those docs. Or man pages! Oh man, man pages… we always just look for a single flag but the description at the top is often a treasure trove of information.

These parts are not the piece of information we are looking for but they can teach us much more than just that one bit that we needed.

Take the time to read them.