Tag: learning

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New developers: “How do I know what to learn and when I’ve learned ‘enough’ ?”

A question frequently asked by new developers is what to learn, how much to learn, and how do you know when you’ve learned enough?

Learn what you need to solve the current problem and then repeat for the next problem.

Don’t think about his as a finite set of knowledge that you need to learn and then that’s it, that’s the end. That’s not how it works. There’s always something new to learn, and there’s always something you’ll find that you don’t know.

Adjust your mindset to keep this in mind and you’ll be ok.

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Building variations of the same app to practice or learn different tech / frameworks / libraries

Once you’re familiar with building a solution for a given problem, as you’re learning new languages, frameworks, libraries or whatever is your current focus, there’s no reason why you have to build something completely new when you’re learning something new. Learning to solve problems is valuable and essential, but if your current goal is to build some experience with a new framework for example, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t rebuild something you’re already familiar with.

For example, if you’ve come across any of my posts before, you’ll know I’ve been spending a huge amount of time writing code around solving and generating Sudoku puzzles. While this has been an interesting exercise in itself, the real goal was to use it as set of related problems for practicing building apps with React and AWS Lambdas.

Even for the frontend I’ve gone through a couple of variations:

The initial frontend app was React with Redux, and it’s served from a public S3 bucket here: http://react-sudoku-solver.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html . The source for this app is here: https://github.com/kevinhooke/sudoku-solver-react-app

I then redeployed it using a CloudFront distribution, with a Route53 record using my domain name, that’s here (it’s still the same app at this point) : http://sudoku-solver.kevinhooke.com/

Recently I rebuilt it using Redux instead of Flux. I don’t have that deployed anywhere yet, but the source for that app is here: https://github.com/kevinhooke/sudoku-solver-react-app-with-redux

I was planning on updating the app to download pre-generated puzzles. That part took me off on a wild goose chase, on working out how to generate puzzles and grade them with a human solver to assess their difficulty. Now I’ve got that part working, I can come back to the frontend app again.

This app, the frontend and the backed solver, generator and grader has kept me busy for month. You don’t have to build something new everytime, if you’re struggling for ideas for personal projects, it’s ok to rebuild something you’re already familiar with.

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Interactive online tutorials for JavaScript

The number of free (or low cost) online tutorials for developers to learn programming today is outstanding. Never before have learning resources been so easily accessible.

My favorite type of tutorial are the interactive style where you get to work on a solution to a problem online and the site checks your result and gives you feedback. Compared to a static tutorial where you just read materials or watch a video, this additional interactive step really helps to apply your understanding at a practical level.

(NOTE: list in progress – last updated 11/03/20)

These are some of my favorite interactive learning resources:

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The best way to learn anything new in software development is to try it out yourself

You can read books, watch YouTubes and listen to as many podcast as you like, but the best way to learn anything new in software development is to try it out for yourself. Why? Because you’ll learn far more from the hands-on experimentation with a new tech/library/api when you try to use it that can ever be transferred as knowledge and experience from a single book/video/article/podcast. What you can learn from a single 1 hour podcast can give you a high level overview of a topic, but you can never learn as much as you will from trying it our yourself.

Part of the learning experience is working out how to solve the problems you run into. The ‘huh, it never said that in the manual’ experience. Once you’ve worked through the unexpected issues along the way, you’ll have built a much deeper understanding of what it actually takes to use a new technology. It’s where the rubber meets the road that counts.

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