| "Tot Facienda Parum Factum" - "So much to do, so little done" This article resonates with me so much. I don't know if every other self taught developer goes/went through this, but its truly annoying. Its so easy to get caught up in a another_new_JavaScript_framework.js or front end framework, but if you look back you begin to see that you wasted time focusing on the trendy things (author mentions he does this).HN, Techcrunch, Github, Bloggers and other resources all influence us with these shiny things. Sooner or later, priorities will change and you will begin to make rational decisions on how you spend your time. I only realised this when I started working a couple of weeks ago at this temporary gig. You soon realise that there are not a lot of hours in the day to use all the shiny things you want. I've come to the point where I have stopped looking at the shiny new things and started focusing on a small set of tools for job at hand.Tools that have been proven to work, and will continue to work regardless of what is currently trending. Rather than learn 3-4 tutorials about a languages syntax for months, pick one comprehensive but concise tutorial on the language and straight after that start a small project in it and stick to it till its finished. Programming languages (or domain tools) in general all have similar concepts. If you learn python, then ruby or other interpreted languages should be easy to understand.If you learn Photoshop, then Gimp or other image manipulation software should be easy to understand and grasp. Understand the concepts, not the tool. Pick a technology you are comfortable with and make stuff. Because at the end of the day, your average Twitter, Instagram, Facebook user doesn't even know(or care) if Scala, Python or PHP is scalable and if the application used best design patterns. All what matters to them is the content, likes, shares, comments et. al. A couple of articles I found truly eyeopening on my journey in software development in general; 1. http://blog.codinghorror.com/php-sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter/ 2. http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/ |
My hypothesis is that the path of learning for the autodidact is non-linear. As problem solvers who adopt optimization as a core value, we beat ourselves up about how unproductive we are, not understanding the intrinsic nature of self-teaching.