How to never stop learning, and learning, and learning...

Hey there! I'm sorry for sending this out late 😞 there has been so. much. going. on. I dropped the ball. This newsletter is actually being sent out a week before my schedule normally would have me send out July's newsletter ... spoiler alert, I haven't even thought about July's topic yet.

I appreciate your patience, and I'll try to highlight everything that I've been up to lately that has already happened or come out (still lots of stuff that's 🤫 hush, hush 🤫).

This email should take less than 10 minutes to read.

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WebJoy Launched!

In case you missed it ... which you probably didn't, because I've been very vocal about it. I launched the podcast with 4 episodes in the first week, and the 5th episode just got released yesterday! You can check out all the episodes on the website below. I'm really excited because the topics are all so different. I have almost 50 guests already planned to fill out all of Season 1, so I have to say, you and I are in for a treat over the coming months!

These are the episodes that have been released so far:

E1: Play Until it Pays with Jason Lengstorf (@jlengstorf)

E2: A Fun, Approachable Way with Jessica (@codergirl1991)

E3: Taking up Space with Alex (@AutisticManager)

E4: Creating Something from Nothing with Shawn (@swyx)

E5: Instead of Using Fire, I Use Ice with Michael (@mtliendo)

Next week we're releasing Episode 6: This is Like Real Life with Kelly (@kellycodeschaos). There's a preview at the end of Episode 5.

Find your happy place… — webjoy.fm WebJoy is an inclusive community centered on celebrating the diverse origins, skills, and experiences that make up the tech industry. Hosted by Eddie Hinkle.

How Does This Continuous Learning Thing Work?

So here’s the thing, no matter how you learned software development, either in a degree program, through self-reaching, or by using a bootcamp-style program; one big risk is that what you learned yesterday isn’t necessarily going to help you tomorrow.

Tech is consistently changing. In fact, even just skills in general fall away. According to Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report, the half life of a skill is five years. That’s it. If you don’t keep learning and growing, your skills will continue to reduce over the years.

The solution is continuous learning. It’s a fancy phrase, you probably hear it around in Agile groups or fancy business seminars. But what does it mean for you, and how can it help you level up your game?

I want to share a framework to think about how you approach continuous learning, as well as some tips on what kinds of resources you can use and some methods to encourage yourself to keep at it!

4 E’s of Continuous Learning

The framework I want to share is the 4 E’s of Continuous Learning: Education, Experience, Exposure, and Environment.

Education is most commonly what you think of when think about learning. This is a discrete event and it a starts and stops. It’s your online courses, tutorials, YouTube videos, etc. This is definitely an essential part of continuous learning, routinely reading or watching new materials that will expose you to other points or view or new technologies. But continuous learning is not just about traditional forms of education.

Experience is what happens over the course of your regular working hours. Are you investigating a new potential technology for the company? Trying to figure out how you all can implement a CI/CD pipeline to make your deployments easier? 

If you aren’t having opportunities to learn while doing your work, try to look for new projects where you can volunteer to investigate something or take charge or a project that is a bit outside your normal wheelhouse. This allows your learning to be more than just watching or reading, but really getting your hands dirty.

Exposure is about the relationships on which you learn. Do you routinely discuss what you are learning with your co-workers? Do you have other friends in the tech industry that work at different companies? What about engaging with other developers on Tech Twitter or having a mentor?

These are all ways that you get exposed to learning in a different way. That’s because we are relational people and our brain is hardwired to retain information presented by others. By ensuring that you have routine exposure to others’ thoughts and ideas in the tech industry through personal relationships, you are learning even when you don’t realize it!

Environment is the final form of learning. Over time you work with different technologies at work. Maybe your company is using JavaScript and they decide to do a migration to TypeScript? The tools and technologies that you interact with during your job creates the environment for your learning. Do you use CI/CD? What is the tech stack at your job? What software is used for version control, BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab, or some homegrown monstrosity?

If there are teams or projects that use tech you don’t get to experience in your normal job, see if there is an opportunity to shift into those projects, even for a short time. If your company isn’t consistently moving its tech stack and platform forward, you could be falling behind the industry. If you have been at your job long enough that you are no longer learning from the environment, and your company doesn’t seem to be progressing, it may be time to look for another job.

Many ways to learn

As you can tell, there are so many ways to learn. Traditional education, Experience in your daily work, Exposure to different people and ideas and the Environment in which you operate. These pieces all work together to ensure that you are consistently and consistently learning. If most of these avenues aren’t actually providing new learning, then you’ll likely stagnate.

So how do you ensure you have a healthy dose of learning? There’s many ways but here’s some suggestions.

6 Tips for Learning Resources

1. Read a tech article daily. Use Twitter, Matter or Daily.Dev. Even just reading a single interesting article every work day will only take a couple of minutes but it will guarantee exposure to new ideas.

2. Read 4-6 books a year. Make sure you mix up the topics. some topics could be: languages, frameworks, agile methodologies. Include a book from a parallel field like UX design or project management. Also include books on what they refer to as soft skills. 

3. Take a course once a year. Something like Epic React or CSS for JS.

4. You learn better when you teach. So teach something routinely, either in person at meetups, on your blog or on YouTube. The great part is that people give you feedback which ends up being more exposure.

5. Build yourself a professional network of peers using Twitter or LinkedIn. Build relationships, understand what they are doing at their companies.

6. Get yourself a mentor. Either ask someone that you know of, or use a resource like ADPList or MentorCruise.

5 ways to motivate yourself

It’s easy to procrastinate or forget to incorporate learning regularly. So I have some suggest methods to keep yourself on track.

1. Create a learning calendar.

Plan out what topics or things you want to learn each month. By giving themes to a month of learning it helps you focus and allows the resources to build on each other. CSS September, anyone? If you do time-blocking, make sure you actually have a set time in your time-blocks for each day.

2. Choose your learning materials and sources wisely.

Anyone can record a video or post a tweet thread. What is their background, what makes them trust worthy? The higher quality the content you’re consuming, the more you’ll get out of it and the more you’ll want to continue.

3. Gamify the learning progress.

Rewarding yourself for every completed book or course will subconsciously motivate you to keep learning.

4. Get a mentor, like I mentioned earlier.

There can be an over-emphasis on courses and videos with everything we have available on the internet. To really grow you need someone more experienced that can give guidance and career advice. Mentors can offer encouragement and instill confidence in a way that a course can’t. 

5. Participate in learning groups.

The power of community in learning is immeasurable. Why do universities and bootcamps all teach in classes or cohorts? More than just learning it is the collective sharing of ideas and perspectives that leads to continuous learning and growth. So find some type of community to talk in. A book club, Twitter space, or Discord server.

Just keep learning

If you remember one thing from this email it’s this: if we aren’t learning, we’re stagnating. That’s a phrase I’ve had on my resume for years, because I believe it. I’ve had a huge personal focus on learning throughout the entire career... really, my entire life. Your mind is like water, if sits too long, it smells. But if you keep it running, you have a nice refreshing stream.

A group of people talking and learning together at a table

One piece of advice you wish you knew 5 years ago?

Every month, I tried to include a piece of advice from someone I respect that they wish they knew 5 years ago.

This month, Zain Rizvi shared this advice:

Your responsibilities keep changing as you go up the career ladder

Junior engineer: Take this tightly defined feature & build it

Mid-level engineer: Take this vaguely defined feature & build it

Senior engineer: Take this known problem & figure out how to solve it

Staff engineer: Take this goal & find the problems we should be solving

Principle Engineer: Figure out the goals

I appreciate that because that helps you understand that if you want to progress in your career, you have to continue to stretch your skills and experiences. If you're a Junior Engineer, you can't just be content building what you're given. Once you feel like you've accomplished that, you should stretch yourself and try to think about how features can be built if they are vaguely defined, etc.

Zain has a ton more great advice, so check them out on Twitter.

Standing out in Technical Interviews

I just spoke at The Monthly Dev, which is hosted by Daily.Dev. The topic was standing out in technical interviews. I joined Jessie Auguste and we each presented a talk. If you missed it and would like to give a watch, feel free to check it out below!

In Case You Missed It...

Here's a couple of the tweets that people enjoyed the most over the last month, in case you missed them.

Eddie @EddieHinkle

Examples of “pro” code are mostly lies Let me explain, they’re: 👉 Harder for a new engineer to change 👉 Sacrifice readability for shortness 👉 Overly complicated “Pro code” is code that is: 🚀 Easy to understand 🚀 Low effort to change 🚀 Simple to hand-off Be a real pro.

Eddie @EddieHinkle

@DThompsonDev I’m a self-taught dev. I haven’t been confident I knew what I was doing most of my career. Recently things have started to take off for me and I feel blessed by my recent positions, but in reality, I’m just an insecure nerd in my heart trying to fit in 😕

Eddie @EddieHinkle

Over the last 15 years, I’ve seen a common factor in all promotions. Junior = self-Influence Mid = individual influence Senior = team influence Staff = cross-team influence Promotions happen as you expand your reach and influence within the company.

Eddie @EddieHinkle

Not everyone has the same origin stories in tech! Find out what some of our guests used to do! Subscribe to the podcast today to get all the teasers and the 4 (FOUR!!) episode launch this Monday!

Eddie @EddieHinkle

I want to share a terrifying secret about your career. 😱 There is more randomness then we want to admit. You may have the best work ethic but your boss hates you or they are low on money. skill + environment = success

Thanks!

Thanks for joining me! I'm working on making sure I approach this a bit more methodologically so that I don't run into a huge delay like this again in the future.

If you have any thoughts or questions, you can reply to this email and it'll come right to me!

Eddie