Studying new things, so many choices, where and how to start, my strategy
Combining work as a freelance developer, which I do now for 15 years, and studying new things can sometimes be cumbersome. Smaller things you learn “on the job” but what if you decide that it is time to dive deep into something new. And what if “new” can be so overwhelming as in all the new technologies and architectures appearing so fast on the market at this moment. In this blog I explain the strategy I eventually chose.
I took the following steps to decide where to start learning new development skills:
- Direction
- Decide
- Plan and stick to the plan
- Evaluate
- Return to the plan if the evaluation meets one or more goals.
At this moment I am evaluating, hence this blog. Below you can read more about my steps.
Direction: thinking about possibilities
Long story short, with a background (at least for 15 years) of Joomla, WordPress and PHP and a lot happening in the WordPress world, I got very interested in headless WP, the possibilities of Gutenberg and the concept of WP moving to/being React, but I had no idea where to start. Reading a lot I got the impression that I was missing some ( a lot of :-)) basic knowledge. And if I was diving into these topics would my newly gained knowledge be helpful in other areas for the upcoming years? And wouldn’t it be better to dive into all the marketingstuff although it doesn’t make me smile much? It is easy to say you have to do what you like most but….. rent to pay etc. Or should I start learning Python for example?
Decide: research the most appealing direction
One of my big discoveries was Udemy.com about 1.5 year ago, online learning when you have time, covering a lot of topics and not expensive, most certainly not if you buy one course and use all the discounts. Udemy has made the decision easier since there are also introductory courses on many topics available.
I started with a course on “React JS, Angular and Vue JS, short comparison and quickstart” to get a notion and discover if I would like it. The most important things I learned from that course were “Yes, like in general”, “Like the instructors teaching method” and “React has the steepest learning curve”. My logic to proceed: if React has the steepest learning curve chances are big learning another framework after React will be easier instead of more difficult. Doing this course will improve my skills and is useful for more than what I want to do at this moment.
Resources to help you research new directions to improve your skills
Useful resources to decide which skills you really want to invest a substantial amount of time in can be:
- talking to people, especially people who have the skills you want to learn and ask them about how they learned it.
- introductory workshops to give you an impression.
- look up interesting things people do with new technologies and find out which skills you need to do it yourself
- reading blogs
- watching video’s
- listening podcasts
Choose whatever suits you most.
I found a lot of interesting resources on social media, I write a separate blog about that later.
Plan and stick to the plan
The general plan (at this moment) is to dive deep into React and adjust the plan when needed or pick one or more moments to evaluate my choice.
I bought a React course on Udemy, same instructor Maximilian Schwarzmüller, because I like his style, more than 40 hours of video and assignments. From the start I did everything the instructor did too, making an enormous amount of typing errors despite Webstorm, and sometimes being desperate or very happy. But sticking to the plan and not give in to temptations of other courses which look interesting was a promise I made to myself.
In the meantime I bought some additional courses mostly related to graphql gatsby, headless WP and Gutenberg using the discounts and searched on Social Media for interesting people to follow, youtube channels and other resources.
Results until today: finished about 60% (equals in my case to 120 hours studying). The next topic is “Advanced Redux”, a nice moment to evaluate and check if I really learned something or am only able to copy the instructor.
Evaluate what you have learned
If you follow the instructor everything is logical, I gave myself a few assignments to see what I could really do with my newly acquired knowledge.
One assignment was a headless wp configuration. I summarize my evaluation here, I experimented with graphql, gatsby, a bootstrap and material ui addition, and frontity and was extremely happy that I more or less knew what I was doing. I googled a lot and used some youtube video’s and additional Udemy resources to get going or solve problems. Not completing a course but watching the modules about topics I got stuck. This website is made with Frontity, only because I liked the mobile menu so much. Next assignment, get this mobilemenu variation in a bootstrap ui and make my website emma-design.nl a headless wp site too.
The evaluation was useful to:
- Check if I really learned something, and yes I did, a lot more than I thought;
- Discover that my background with other programming languages is very useful;
- Make me a bit careless with trying. When I was deploying to Netlify I was not 100% sure what I was doing but when the configuration worked I did understand. There is a material version of this site on Netlify :-);
- Have a lot of fun.
Return to the plan
I think it is useful to play around a bit more before returning to the course, I give myself a month. But I will return for it being a nice complete overview of the basics of React and Redux, making it possible to understand a lot of code you use when going into other libraries so much easier.
The point of evaluation depends on what course exactly you are learning.