As I find myself with a few years of experience as a developer and look around to some of my peers who are about in the same place as I am career-wise, I can't help but to think that I'm missing something. Others are posting more about cool things they're working on, skills that I had always been thinking about that just never had the time to pick up (or tried and failed and never kept going). And so the past few days I have been reflecting on what I have been doing wrong, what has worked in the past, and if there is anything I can be doing to fix it.
I recently came across an episode of the Dev Discuss, with guest Shaun Wang (aka swyx) about the concept of learning in public. This episode gave me one of the biggest aha moments I've had in a long time. I don't have a CS degree from a university. One of the major benefits of my bootcamp experience (or really any class-based scenario) is the fact that all of you are learning together. You're with at least a few other people and you all have the same goal - figure out wtf is going on. I think the open collaboration of a bunch of people stumbling their way through the race until they reach the finish line is a huge contributing factor to learning so much, so quickly.
Compare the bootcamp setting to the workplace. You may or may not be on a team, and of those people on the team, there is going to be varying levels of experience. You might be the junior in a room of more senior people, or be the most experienced in the room. But, at least in my experiences, I have never been in a professional environment that mimics the same "lets figure this out together" scenario that was found in the classroom. Then the "aha" moment hit. I learned so much in that short amount of time because all my learning had, essentially, been in public. Trying things out, failing, getting help when I didn't understand, and helping others when I did understand. And my professional experience had been filled with more feelings of needing to learn in private so they don't find out that I didn't know that thing to begin with.
So after listening to this podcast episode I was finally able to give some language to the feeling I had been having for a while. It had been so long since I had learned in public, that I was missing out on some of the great benefits. All of this preamble is to set up my plan for learning in public. This post and series of posts are not really intended for anyone else other than myself, but I want to put all of this out there publically so that other people who might be in my shoes could benefit from my perspectives and journey.
I'm planning on doing a 100 Days Of Code style commitment to get into some deeper levels of Javascript. Currently, at work I'm using Vue, so I'll probably start there with some bits and bobs of things I'm learning as I begin to pick up Vue. I don't want to forecast the what that I'll be focusing on too specifically, because things change. I have a 1-year-old, so getting the time outside work to focus on this is going to be a big enough exercise in discipline without having to stick to too many things all at once.
So, here are my challenge rules for the next 100(ish) days:
- Spend at least an hour a day on non-work-related code. > I have a full-time job and a family, so Goal is 7 days a week, but I will accept a minimum of 5 days per week.
- Write at least one blog post a week about what I have been working on. That blog post will (hopefully) be about a specific code topic, but who knows. I've never consistently blogged before so it might take a bit to get in the groove of things.
- First topic: Javascript.
My goal first and foremost is to become a better developer. But also I want to get more involved with the developer community. So please don't hesitate to share your own thoughts and journeys!
Top comments (2)
Chaz best of luck and thank you for the excellent links, swyx had me in tears with "People think you suck? Good..." pretty much sums up my learning philosophy. I totally understand how hard it is to find time and energy to do even more when you're raising a kid. Something I like to do, and I suppose this depends on your personality, is whatever I'm learning I try to connect it to a question or a problem that interests me (could be working on a bug in some open source code, just writing a quick function on rosettacode, building an app you'd like to see exist, etc.), and then make coming up a solution my goal. Then learning feels purposeful, you get excited about it easier, and in my experience you get a deeper appreciation of whatever new tools you're discovering.
This is a great approach. I think one of the things that I’ve missed from the classroom setting was the energy of lots of people trying to make those connections at the same time, vs once you’re at a job a lot of the time it’s just you making those connections alone. Especially in the mostly remote landscape were in now.
I’m hoping that some of this learning in public journey will help satisfy part of that group search for understanding that I think I’ve been missing.