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find good books: I’m an adept textual learner, and benefit especially from longer format tech books. However, as a beginner you don’t have a good compass for which books are worth your time, so it’s vital to…
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find informal mentors: especially when starting out, anyone who has any experience with a topic will be able to point you to resources. If you are fortunate enough to know someone with some professional experience, they can definitely serve as a guide, so you should…
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cultivate kindness and camaraderie with experts: when I decided I wanted to learn Rails, it was because I already knew folks building webapps with it in their day-to-day, and they seemed like the sort of people I would enjoy spending my worklife with. I asked them to direct me to resources, and some of them stuck…
[brief aside: it’s important to remember to evaluate and discard anything that doesn’t work for you. How you do that is a problem left to the reader.]
- Prefer open to closed: I learn by example, so being able to review other people’s code, especially in popular OS projects is invaluable
- Allow slack in your approach: if at all possible I prefer to have non-directed work time. One implementation is GOOG’s 20% time. This is ok… my best experience of slack being productive was when I lead a small team of remote engineers through a hack week project with an open-ended goal of determining what strategies, if any, would reduce our test suite runtime. We didn’t end up committing changes, but we all learned a ton about what testing strategies were expensive over the course of a long project, and it’s given me strong opinions™️ re: testing strategies
- Ask naive questions: just learning the acronyms can be elucidating
- Break stuff, read stacktraces and docs, fix stuff
- Pursue varied and wide interests across your network: my interest in cyberpunk led me to a transhumanist meetup, which connected me to a local makerspace, which put me in touch with a hackerspace in another state, i flew out there for a conference once, and one of the coders I met there recommended some good books.