Learning

Do you know how to learn?

Learning to learn is one of the most important skills that you can have, and in fact, that is the main skill to learn from school and life. This is ironic, since usually very little time is spent at school and life in learning out to learn.

Learning is like a muscle, the more you do it, the better your become. And just like in sports, there are specific techniques that you can use to learn more efficiently.

As a developer if you are not passionate about learning, you are on the wrong job!

It is not about learning one, or two or three programming languages or development frameworks. You need to learn 10+ languages and be on a constant learning curve. Each language will tech you something new (don't worry, only the first 5 will be hard, after that, the key paradigms will always feel familiar). For example, it is very hard to learn about functional programming until you start coding in Node or in Scala (after banging your head against the wall for a bit, it will click, and you will love its power and ability to write really simple code)

It is about learning new paradigms, about interconnecting your skills. What you learn in one domain, will be applicable in another. For example, being a better musician, artist, athlete, car mechanic or philosopher will make you a better developer

Application Security (AppSec) will take this to another level, since you will be asked to code review in all sorts of languages (which is great, since that is the best way to learn). AppSec focus on how 'it' really works, now just how it behaves.

The reality is that we are in age of the 'professional amateur', where you very rarely have time to really specialize in a particular language or technology. And when you do specialize, if you are not careful, you will be stuck in the past and be the one that is responsible for maintaining the legacy applications.

The best description I've read about how learning occurs is in the Badass: Making Users Awesome book, where Kathy Sierra outlines two key requirements to learn:

• Practice right - it is not about how much one practices, but how effective that practice is. This is connected with the idea of being in 'the zone' and it really shows that the real talent is not in being good/excellent in a particular area (for example playing guitar) but it is having the ability and perseverance to practice and learn effectively. Ironically too much talent can actually back fire, since it makes the first part easy and doesn't prepare the student for the hard road ahead. One of my best teachers always said "being good is 1% talent and 99% perspiration'
• Consume large amounts of good examples - the very interesting data point here is how much we learn subliminally and by osmosis. Related to the idea that books are much better mediums to learn, when we learn we absorb much more that we think we do. This is why it is so important to keep seeing (and learning from) good examples of what we are are trying to learn. When we see or read from somebody that has gained mastery of a particular topic, we are learning all sorts of things. This is why as a developer is is key that you read lots of source code and try lots of technologies, since each one will teach you much more than you realise. Remember that all Open Source code is available (usually on GitHub). Spent time on projects you use and dig deep into the source code.

What you really should to be worried about is when you stop learning.

Ironically this can happen the more you move up the company's corporate ladder. There is a big trap of management, which pushes highly technical and proficient developers into 'management' or 'architectural' positions (this is also called the Peters Principle where "employees are promoted to the maximum of their incompetence"). When this happens, these highly knowledgeable professionals have very little time to spend on technical issues, spending most of of their on meetings, spreadsheets and 'non learning activities'

Here are some ideas for how to keep the technical skills up-to-date:

• Be involved as a technical resources (not as a manager) for a couple hours per week in real-world projects (ideally around cloud solutions or incident handling)
• ask the team to create DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) that abstract their work into easy to code components, and then write code on top of those DSLs
• write and review tests (best way to learn is to read source code, specially unit/integration tests, since they tell the story of what is being tested)
• write integration scripts to automate day-to-day tasks (for example using Zapier and AWS Lambdas)

My view is that no matter your role, you must make sure that you remain highly technical, have a deep understanding of what is going on, and always keep learning. Programming is one of the best ways to do this.

Work in a learning environment

Ideally this learning environment will be part of your job.

If not, then evenings and weekends are a great time to learn, while you find another job that puts learning at the center of their ecosystem

If you are learning things you are passionate about, the extra effort to learn should feel easy, and actually be relaxing.