"You haven't heard of this?" is a phrase that we hear constantly from the hipsters in our lives. I am guilty of saying this. We all like to be in the know and stay ahead of the game. Tech is constantly changing at a rapid pace. The jokes about the abundance of JavaScript libraries, new frameworks, and new programming languages are everywhere.
There is an endless stream of awesome things to learn. The search engine has brought us so much information. It's awesome....until it's not. Many of us have heard a similar variation of this phrase ,and some of us ,including myself, have also said this. Has anyone ever questioned if using this language harms us more than helps us? This industry is amazing because there is so much we can learn about and there are many problems to be solved with new tools. We have to stay focused though.
What can you do to fight this? What works for me is keeping a list of what I want to learn. I stick with that list. If I come across something that I want to learn, I put it in another list that I call a "parking lot." I am sure this might seem boring and mundane to some of you. This has been key to helping me advance my skills ,and sometimes the easiest lessons in life are the hardest to learn.
What are you learning about? Do you have any tips or tricks for how you stay focused?
Top comments (1)
Working for an agency I'm pretty lucky that I get exposed to a lot of different technologies. So just keeping up with my job is plenty, I do have a backlog of things I'd love to learn but I'm pretty happy right now just learning whatever the stack of the current project is.
I think the biggest thing is passion, find a language and framework that you love and then focus on learning it really, really well. Despite what I said above I still find myself going back to Ruby for personal projects because I just love it, but I'm doing things with Rails this summer I've never done before so still very much learning.