Inside Out vs Outside In Learning

Ben Madley, 28 May 2022

In 2016 I was doing an internship at a brilliant company. We were having a chat over lunch and one of the developers said that they thought that you should learn how jQuery works before you use it. I call this Inside Out learning: learn how something works before you use it. Of course at the time, I was barely comfortable using jQuery.

I was actually from a maths background and looking to start a career in software which had started as a hobby. We, of course, are all used to how we are taught in maths. Before I was taught the grid method of multiplication (or your preferred method):

Using the grid method

I was first taught about the distributive property of the ring of integers (I’d been taught about what a ring was much earlier of course). This meant that I knew

- 63 x 24 =
- (60 + 3) x (20 + 4) = -- Apply the distributive property
- 60 x 20 + 60 x 4 + 3 x 20 + 3 x 4 =
- 1200 + 240 + 60 + 12 = 
- 1512

and the grid method was an easier way of writing this.

I’m sure you’re not surprised to know that I was not taught about rings and distributivity before I learned the grid method. In the same way I don’t think that it’s necessary to learn how our basic tools work before we use them. Especially for our junior developers. It’s ok to do Outside In learning. We teach maths Outside In so that we can start getting stuff done.

The Inside Out viewpoint for teaching tech comes from our teachers being around for the evolution. The developer who believed that we should learn how jQuery worked before using it, probably started their career before jQuery was popular. It worked for them.

We’re seeing the same thing with Cloud technologies and big JavaScript frameworks. It’s unreasonable to expect our new recruits to start by learning how to set up and manually configure servers that we won’t ever use. To start by learning how to write vanilla JavaScript we don’t want to have in our app. However, this is a great thing to learn as you gain seniority. In other words, practice Outside In learning. Start by learning how to use a tool, then learn how to use it better, then learn how it works.

Why not start by reading about Blub Studies?