I made a New Years resolution about five years ago to read at least one technical article in full every day.
I seemed to already read a lot for my coding career in general, how can one not? But I was, and still am, a notorious skimmer. I am easily distracted and often don't truly read what I am reading.
So one year I decided to truly read articles online in full, and commit to it. I eventually fell off from the every day part of the resolution, but in getting involved I just learned so much—not just about the code, but about my career and the software industry in general. I learned about how blogging keeps the networked learning happening, and eventually it really did lead me to building this website, dev.to.
I think of New Years resolutions as both corny and invaluable. It is a great time of year to reflect, look ahead, and identify the nudges you need.
It's January 2nd, and not too late to adopt truly reading as a goal. I am making it one of my resolutions again this year. My other resolutions include asking for help more often, and communicating my routine to others in order to set expectations.
Hope this helps somebody out there.
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Slowing down and actually understanding content and how things work I feel will soon be highly prized skills. We operate with programs and things that allow us to not actually understand how things are getting done. Libraries, automation software, frameworks, etc. They are all amazing and useful but when they fail or bug out, we are often left having to try and find customer support, read forums, and deep dive tech papers in a crunch. The ones the really rise to the top, from what I've seen, are the ones that use those thing but understand how they work. When they break, these people fix or already have a work around. That's game chnager status
Your personal website is truly amazing
Yeah I never got the part like people going to slam the gym in January , its like oh I can only start exercising starting January 🙄
@ben after reading your article now I can definitely do
I started this a couple of years ago and mix it up with reading a post in depth, including following sub links or doing additional research if I am not familiar with a part of the post (which means that a 10 min read can end up taking about 30 or 45 mins), to watching a tech video on YT or writing a small piece. I think the key thing is to do something small and do it consistently.
I felt guilty for skimming this post. :-(. But I do see your points. Most often a simple change will make huge difference.
One of my goals this year is to actually read all the articles I've been bookmarking on DEV. Somehow that number already got to 366... 😄
Thanks so much, what a great idea! Too often resolutions are so complicated that they don't set people up for success. I made a similar resolution a few years ago and it turned into a habit I still have; no devices for the last hour before bed, just reading. It instantly made me read books I thought I didn't have the time for and I felt more relaxed before bed. Simple = success!!!
I like to think of myself as a fast reader, skimming pages at ultralightning speed, only to realize after a few minutes that I retained absolutely nothing of the page in front of me. Thanks for sharing your new year's resolution and for bringing it to my attention, I definitely have to slow down when it comes to reading stuff online!
That's inspiring! Did you seek out articles to be a specific topic or was it anything that sounded interesting?
I have trouble reading things that sound interesting, but aren't related to what I already know and work with.
What kind of tech articles? I have a tendency to read something in full, want to try everything I read about, and I eventually have to pull myself out of a deep, deep rabbit hole. Hyper-focus is real!
Thanks for this Ben! A different perspective than what I had of new year resolutions. I used to believe that resolutions if need should be implemented with immediate effect and not just from jan1. But, "It is a great time of year to reflect, look ahead, and identify the nudges you need." is a good point 👌
This really helps. I didn't make any resolution of a sort but I always had a passion to read. Be it a book or an article online. Therefore, I first read developer-related articles initially, then took interest in more career/job-related ones which included topics like productivity, health and life.
This eventually led me to write my first article on Medium (2-3 years ago). It was not related to dev but I was determined to write and learn more by reading articles day-by-day.
Reading is such an important aspect of our lives and being a developer we know what value it has in our industry.
Thanks for the writing @ben . I made a resolution last year to contribute more open source works. When I say 'contribute', I really want to understand and learn from other codebases. And I can proudly say that I have a rough understanding of dev.to codebase and have made a contribution too. This year I focus more towards on continuing that journey and come out of my comfort zone. I am already excited about that 😀
Same for me, all too often I just skim and don't have the patience to read and truly grok the details in a technical article ... bad habit.
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