A crucial part for any dev to stay relevant and competitive in the field is to pick-up new technologies fast.
What is your usual approach to learning a new tech?
- Do you start right away with studying Official docs?
- Do you first check some YouTube tutorials, read some blog posts to get an overall insight?
- Do you prefer to browse some open-source projects and experiment in online playgrounds to explore the practical side?
- Or do you usually start the project with minimal knowledge and search for something only when the necessity arises?
Top comments (10)
I generally check the doc, read some blog posts and in parallel write a proof of concept.
Once done, if I really want to learn it, I build an app, a prototype or a tool with it. Developing a project I will really use make me dive deeper.
I generally start with a tutorial which is relatively similar to what I am trying to achieve. Get that partially up and running, and then hack together the rest of the solution from a mix of the documentation, tutorials, and StackOverflow.
That way, if something doesn't quite work, I can remove some of the bits I've hacked together and see if it works as it gets closer and closer to the tutorial or documentation.
It's working so far as I continue to learn Vue as part of a real-world project.
I first check video/written tutorial to see the capabilities and possibilities as well as general ways of "doing things" in the perticular tech. If that's not available I check the docs for some examples. Then I try to find an idea which is interesting for me to work on , and incorporates the tech, and start working on it, searching for things in docs, stack overflow , DEV or other blogs as I need them.
I would fully check the description on what the tech is trying to solve, and ask myself, is there any problem I have with my current (or any other) projects that would require me to use this thing?
If not, then I just don't. I honestly don't think you can pick things up fast while still being reasonable, plus, you can just learn it as you go.
This "not always caring about new tech" is important, there'll be a time where your life is just so busy that you can't afford to learn, use and maintan said tech. It's better to just watch from the sidelines.
If it's something worth trying, then I would always vouch learning by doing, and for me that's churning through the example code and projects, and making a project of your own that implements said tech.
I think from those example you can quickly judge how intuitive the tech is, whether or not it's actually worth picking up in the first place.
I think you're asking two different questions.
1) How do I become aware of new tech
2) How do I learn to use new tech
For the first, I use this site, daily.dev/, and when I'm in stackoverflow and someone links to a repo or mentions a technology I haven't heard of I check out their website (or repo).
Second, I do a combination of things but it always ends with me doing a small project with that tech. It's the only way I can get it into my bones.
I often find myself using daily.dev too much, I don't know if that's a good thing 😄😄
1-Documentation
2-Use some basic commands
3-Start a basic project
4-Read some articles, google , stack overflow
5-Choose a bigger complex project.
go from the basics - deep down - then Use that piece of tech as much as you can
The trick, in the beginning, is not to lift something you can't carry, I guess 😉