After spending 12+ years in software development, I've found it challenging to keep learning consistently. But if you identify what you're passionate about and follow a solid learning path, you'll learn new things all the time.

This article will discuss three important areas of developer education that you may find useful in your learning journey. I have been following this path for the last two years and I've seen very positive results.

TL;DR

Become a better learner and developer by:

• Being an active part of the developer community
• Starting your own blog
• Building side projects

This article is all about experience sharing and how to make these things happen. Just chill and read it with an open mind 🧘.

Be an Active Part of the Developer Community

When we focus all our attention on something, learning becomes easy. The challenging part, though, is to know what to learn.

Where should we find help? Is there a better way to solve certain problems? How do we not reinvent the wheel? And finally, how do we make it happen continuously?

Developer Community to grow together

Being part of one or more developer communities in your areas of interest helps solve these challenges in a significant way.

Don't worry if you do not have anything to contribute in the early days. Just hang in there and soak up information, connect with like-minded people, observe best practices, and so on. You will eventually contribute, and that comes naturally.

Here are the developer communities, learning platforms, and social media outlets that I've found immensely helpful. Please note that opinions are mine, and some of you may not agree or might want to add more to the list. That's perfectly fine, and you are welcome to do so.

• Twitter: When it comes to staying relevant with technologies, soft mentoring, and getting quick tips and tricks, Twitter is a great platform. If you don't have one already, create a Twitter account and join the platform. Follow topics that interest you (using hashtags) and people who post about things you want to learn more about to get started.
  I've had a dormant Twitter account since 2009! I started using it actively a year ago and can tell you how useful it is.
• freeCodeCamp: If you are looking for focused learning, give freeCodeCamp a try. There are thousands of hours of study materials available, and it's free! You should join the forum to get insights, answers, and solutions. You can earn free verified certifications as well. If you are reading this article, you are probably aware of the freeCodeCamp curriculum already.
• Hashnode: This is one of the fastest-growing developer communities out there today. Once you join Hashnode, you can follow the tags and community members of your choice to see articles, discussions, and more in your feed. Another USP is that you get a free blogging domain where you can write your articles and publish them.
• Dev.to: a mature developer community with many contributors who write articles, discusses topics, and share thoughts. You can follow the topics of your interest to create a personalized feed.
• daily.dev: This is not precisely a community yet, but rather an aggregator of many. It does an excellent job of bringing you a list of hot articles you might be interested in without looking for them. Just install their browser extension, and you are all set to go.

Apart from those I mentioned above, LinkedIn, Reddit, Hackernoon, Code Newbie, Women who code, StackOverflow, and Hackernews are other fantastic communities to look out for.

Start Your Own Blog (or Something Equivalent)

Teaching and sharing knowledge is the best way to gain more knowledge. It is a universal truth that you can not teach a topic well without learning it well.

Having a technology blog (or something like a YouTube channel) can help you participate in the learning-sharing cycle.

Start Blogging

My key takeaways from blogging for the last couple of years are:

• Your research on a topic helps you gain more knowledge about it.
• You get better visibility in the developer community by contributing to that community.
• You create a series of knowledge bases for yourself that you can refer to or use (maybe as a speaker, in a video, and so on).
• If you are a non-English speaker and write your articles in English, it helps you get a better grasp of the language.
• You can create a strong portfolio for yourself by mentioning your blog. I found that this is beneficial when you pitch to writing for publications like freeCodeCamp News.
• Last but not least, you can earn money from your articles. Some publications pay you per article. You can be a guest writer for certain organization's blogging programs. If you are just getting started with blogging, do not put much emphasis on earning money. Focus on delivering useful content to the community. Then financial opportunities will come naturally.

If you are thinking about starting a blog with your own domain, check out Hashnode. It has everything you need as a blogging platform, and it is free. If you have an existing domain, you can map that to it too. So give it a try.

Alternatively, you can publish on dev.to, Hackernoon, and other communities I mentioned above. You can also apply to become a writer on freeCodeCamp News.

Build Some Side Projects

An effective way to polish your learning and fuel your passion is by doing side projects. In many cases, you may not be able to work on any technology you like at work. But no one can stop you from doing a side project using that tech.

Do Side Projects

A side project can help you:

• Live your passion
• Generate ideas
• Learn new skills
• Grow in new areas
• Contribute to the open-source community
• Earn rewards and money

So how do you get started? First, you should create an account with GitHub (or any other source code repository manager).

Next, you need an idea of what to build. Start small, and plan to do many projects. Try making something that you may want to use.

Then identify what you've learned from it, document it as an article, and publish it.

Before we go

I hope you've found this article insightful, and that it motivates you to check out these learning areas. I would like to hear from you. Let's connect.

You will find me active on Twitter (@tapasadhikary). Please feel free to follow me. You can read some of the other articles from my blog (blog.greenroots.info). All my side projects are in GitHub (atapas), and they are open-source. Please feel free to try/fork/follow.

You may also like:

• How to find blog content ideas effortlessly?
• Why do you need to do Side Projects as A Developer?
• 16 side project GitHub repositories you may find useful
• How to write consistently, a guide for technical writers

Design as a developer

Design is a term that can describe many parts of the process. Most often, it's probably thought of as the visual designers or UX designers who are actively working to make your product usable or beautiful.

A question that I commonly get asked or see online is where should one start to learn the basics of design?

This question makes me happy. It's an important part of the process that is constantly a secondary thought. And when I asked this on Twitter, I received some thoughtful responses!

We're living in an age where good UX is increasingly seen as important, but it's still nowhere near the top of the list for those who are learning their way through development. It's still an afterthought that's tossed over to the design team when you're at the 2nd half of your last sprint before launch.

So before I share with you some resources, I'm going to start by explaining why these things are important.

Giving something for your visitors to use

Starting from the top – you can have the best, most ingenious product that blows all competition away, but if no one knows how to use it, it realistically has no value.

Fictional Pied Piper's app tanked because of a bad user experience

Our fictional friends at Pied Piper learned this the hard way when their product launch with a groundbreaking compression algorithm didn't go over too well because no one knew how to actually use it.

But this is a realistic scenario. We learned from Craigslist that your website or app doesn't need to have a slick design, but it has to be usable.

Craigslist in 2001 vs 2020

For nearly 20 years, Craigslist really hasn't changed that much. A few tweaks to make things a little bit cleaner, but overall it's the same basic layout and experience.

Unfortunately, budget is a concern, and sometimes you can only stretch it so much which doesn't always include a designer. But try to at least get some outside perspective – it can even be a family member or a friend! You would be surprised how much insight you can gather by trying to get your family over the holiday to try to use your app.

The goal is ultimately to get your product in front of someone that hasn't been heads down in it for the past year to get a pair of fresh eyes and a new perspective.

Becoming more productive

Putting on my process hat – another overlooked aspect of prioritizing design time is the amount of overall time you can possibly save.

Designers don't always get it right the first time, let alone leaving developers to create the design. That's not even including the possibility that your customer or product owner doesn't like the direction you took.

Why spend a couple sprints building out a solution only to start from scratch when you have to throw it all away? Not only have you wasted your customer's time, you've wasted your whole team's time.

Get design feedback early. Work with the design resources you have to iterate and work in feedback as you go. It's important to solve the UI problems before you develop the solutions.

Design sketches from Unsplash.com

And this can generally help your team flesh out ideas. Visually seeing an idea, even as a rough sketch on a piece of paper or a disposable prototype, can completely change the way you look at the solution.

All of this early feedback and brainstorming will help you achieve the end-goal of a better product and user experience.

Developers are users

Most of people reading this post probably have written code in one form or another. But have you ever thought about how your code impacts other developers?

There are many layers to how your code can provide a better experience for another developer. The basic being – is the documentation that you created readable and easy to understand?

_Stripe's API documentation_

While it's certainly important for your fellow teammates, they should typically be able to message you on Slack or hop on a call when they run into trouble. But how about those developers that only have your documentation?

Beautiful documentation isn't that which has a beautiful design, it's one that thoroughly walks through the code that you've created so that others can understand what it does and how they can use it. Just as a visitor to your app needs to know how to use the UI, a developer working with your services needs to know how to use the API.

A little extra delight

But of course everyone wants something nice to look at. Not only can design treats make people happy and smile, it can also help avoid stress and tension.

Josh W. Comeau includes cute, happy graphics throughout his site

Having a page that's ugly or overly thick with data can be unsettling. Not only can it hurt the usability, but the clutter and color choices can make people feel uneasy, stressed, and full of anxiety.

While your team might not have the resources for full-time designers, taking a little time to learn the basics of design can help set you on your journey of becoming a well rounded developer.

Resources for learning design basics

Like it or not – we're all "designers" in a way. We're all building tools and systems that ultimately will be used by another human being. We should do what we can to make our creations friendlier to use for everyone who comes next.

Since you're now inevitably inspired to spend some time and learn about design, there are luckily a lot of resources available for you to get started.

Videos

• Abstract: The Art of Design (Netflix)
• Objectified (Amazon)

Books

• Design for Hackers (Amazon)
• The Non-Designer's Design Book (Amazon)

Email Course

• Design for Hackers
• Design Academy
• Hack Design

Misc

• Design Tips from @steveschoger

What's your take on design as a developer?

Have any of these worked particularly well for you? Am I missing something that made design click for you? Please share with me on Twitter!

Join the conversation!

Tom is no longer in your extended network

It's been almost 10 years since we saw massive changes underway at MySpace. If you don't remember what MySpace was, it was the popular social network before Facebook was king (though technically it still exists).

Tom's MySpace Profile

This was when everyone started with a new friend named Tom who was the co-founder of MySpace. Everyone could set their own "top 8" that could make or break the best friendships if you snubbed someone.

You could also set a song for your profile which would be added as a little player, back when it was “okay” to automatically play a song when your page loaded.

But MySpace is now a thing of the past, so why am I talking about it?

Making MySpace, your space

MySpace had a unique characteristic about it that you don't see in any of the popular social networks these days – it allowed you to add HTML and CSS into the page so that you could really do whatever you wanted with the your profile.

Example of custom code in a MySpace profile from dummies.com

Though from a simplistic perspective, this gives you some limited options. Maybe you can add some CSS that updates how the headers look and change a background color.

But realistically, this opened the door to adding full webpages that you could overlay on top of your profile by positioning your new layout above the original content with some z-indexing.

Custom MySpace profile for the band Filmore

The trick was, you had a limited amount of characters that you could put in each input. That had limitations, but these limitations helped promote creativity whether it was figuring out how to strip all of the whitespace in the code or by figuring out a way to add something with less overall code.

Learning through hobbies

Building MySpace profiles was addicting! It was a social medium that you could customize to make your own and stamp your name on it to show everyone what you did.

While you could do the same with your own website, it wasn't as easy at the time. And building out a profile on MySpace was easy, free, and you could connect with all of your friends.

One of my portfolio custom profiles

Each time I made a new page, I tried to think about what else I could do. I was even involved with small communities where we would share our work and help each other figure out how to hack things into a profile page (shoutout DM!).

This whole time, as I was trying to learn what more I could customize, I was learning how to code! I learned about how I could squeeze every inch of HTML I could out of a document and I also developed an understanding of how CSS selectors worked. I also learned how positioning allowed me to do cool things on the page and how to center things back when we didn’t have the option to flexbox all the things.

Flexbox all the things!

And this led to “business Colby” developing a sense of entrepreneurship. At this point, I was still in high school, but I was able to spin off a little business from building these pages.

While a modest $50 per profile seems low, that's a lot for a highschooler in 2004, not to mention that was a lot of money for another highschooler to pay to get one created!

STK Counter-Strike 1.6 team website

But this was the start of my code journey. Building off of MySpace, I started creating actual websites for Counter-Strike teams (CAL anyone?) and bands which would ultimately lead me to make a career out of coding.

Turning hobbies into jobs

I've heard others with a similar story, even others who similarly started with MySpace that eventually turned their interest into a coding career. While the MySpace era is something we all look back and laugh at, it really inspired a lot of people to find what they love to do.

Finding this kind of inspiration can be important to discovering how you want to spend your time. Whether it's a hobby or learning on the side to turn it into a career, keeping engaged with something you're actually interested in is important to learning a new craft.

But it's important to pay attention to how you engage with that new interest. You don't want to force it into a career and quickly burn yourself out. That will lead to regret and resentment.

While I got lucky that my interest in coding ended up turning into my career, I make sure to not "take my work home" as it's important to separate the work from your personal interests like random OSS projects on the side.

Find what motivates you

The important thing is to find something that can motivate and inspire you to develop your passion whether for a career or hobby. Each of us have our own journey, whether code related or not, and we should try to find something that will make us happy.

What was your inspiration for your interests? Share with me on Twitter!

In this article, I’ll explain why podcasts replaced a lot of my Wikipedia usage for informal learning. I’ll also talk about how I listen to 5+ hours of podcasts every day.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

— The Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s autobiography (full text)

Wikipedia as an informal learning resource

In the Web 2.0 era (mid 2000s - early 2010s), Wikipedia was a great informal learning resource for me. Whenever I wanted to learn about a new topic, a historic event, or a famous person, I searched on Google. Wikipedia pages were usually among the first few search results.

I would read the Wikipedia page and decide if I wanted to dig deeper (such as finding books to read on the subject). Most often, I learned enough from just reading a Wikipedia page and moved on.

For example, when I wanted to learn Django (a Python programming framework), I started with the Wikipedia entry Django (web framework). Same as learning about the life of Don Valentine, the city of Kyoto, the historic event Battle of Kunyang, an overview of Game of Thrones, and more.

Note: Reading Wikipedia pages is just the beginning of learning something, which is what I mean by "informal learning". If I gain enough interest, I'll find other more serious materials (e.g., books, programming docs...) for "formal learning".

Podcasts as another informal learning resource

Then around 2013, I started to work as a software engineer full-time. In open office workplaces, many knowledge workers listened to music via Spotify, Pandora, or the like, while working on a computer.

But I felt guilty for not learning new things and just listening to music all day long. Instead, I started to listen to podcasts while I worked (mostly writing code), consuming tons of information from these podcasts, e.g., true crime cases, news, career paths for engineers, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs, and learning about historic events.

But how is it possible to listen to podcasts at a programming job? Well, other than writing "if... else..." logics, there are actually a lot of "low thinking" tasks in modern software engineering, e.g., writing unit tests, refactoring code, copying & pasting code from Stack Overflow, tweaking CSS styling, tweaking config files for some server software, playing with 3rd party APIs, messing with HTML, configuring IDE, setting up dev environment, waiting for CI to finish, writing throwaway code to test out new technology, experimenting some low risk DevOps tasks on local dev or staging, testing coworker's code locally for code review, manually doing QA for certain product features...

Turns out I'm not the only one who listen to podcasts while writing code –

Fast forward to 2016 and I found that I was consuming more information from podcasts than from other media formats like TV, YouTube videos, or news websites. To be precise, I spent five-plus hours per day listening to podcasts when I was writing code, commuting to work, working out in the gym, grocery shopping, and so on.

Basically, whenever my hands and eyes were busy but my mind was free, I would listen to podcasts.

Podcasts just make knowledge accessible, like Wikipedia. There are tons of podcasts on the Internet that cover basically every topic!

As of February 2020, there are close to one million publicly accessible RSS-based podcasts and more than 61 million episodes on the Internet.

How do these numbers compare with other media types?

• Audible has more than 470,000 audiobooks.
• Wikipedia has around 6 million English articles.
• IMDB has over 6.5 million titles (movies, TV shows, TV episodes, etc.).
• Spotify has over 50 million tracks.

It’s easier to produce a podcast than write a book, a blog post, or produce a video. It lowers the bar for subject experts who produce content — they just chat in front of a microphone!

As a listener, how cool is it to listen to an expert on a subject dumping knowledge through my ears?

The best part is that podcasts are free! Yes, there are a few exclusive podcasts available on walled garden platforms, but most great podcasts are free to listen to.   

Of course, many of them are ad-supported, so it’s not completely free if you consider that the time spent listening to ads is money wasted. I might be biased, but I think podcast ads are less annoying than YouTube ads :).

I built Listen Notes for myself

In early 2017, I built a podcast search engine, Listen Notes, to help myself discover interesting podcast episodes. There were so many podcasts, and I couldn’t subscribe to them all.

The old podcast listening model was to subscribe to a few shows and only listen to new episodes from those shows. This may have worked in 2013 when there were not many podcasts.

It’s like when we bookmarked a few websites in the mid 1990s and visited those few websites again and again because there were not a lot of websites on the Internet.

As the volume of podcasts grows faster and faster, the subscribe-then-listen-to-only-a-few-shows model won’t work any more.

Gradually, I added new features to Listen Notes and turned it into my full-time job in late 2017. I’ve been working on Listen Notes for over two years so far. Btw, you may be interested in the tech stack of Listen Notes.

Listen Notes embodies my quirky way of discovering and consuming podcast content :).

How exactly do I listen to podcasts and use them as my new Wikipedia?

My podcast listening is centered around a master playlist (created on Listen Notes):

By the way, It's very easy to create such playlist and embed on freeCodeCamp publication, which uses Ghost.

As of writing this article (February 2020), I’ve listened to more than 3,100 podcast episodes since late 2017.

My master playlist

I subscribe to this master playlist on Overcast. Other than that, I don’t subscribe to individual podcasts — which is very different than most podcast listeners out there.

I also have a private playlist with only Chinese podcasts that I share with my wife :). We both add episodes to that playlist periodically. It’s fun to listen to podcasts together in the car when we are on a road trip.

Listen to podcasts on Overcast, without subscribing to individual podcasts...

I add episodes to the master playlist multiple times a day.

If you are an Instapaper or Pocket user, you may be familiar with the “read it later” concept — you come across an online article, but you don’t have time to read it right away, so you add the article to Instapaper or Pocket to read later.

On Listen Notes, I named the playlist feature as “Listen Later.” You get the idea.

There are a few ways I discover new episodes to add to Listen Later.

First, when I encounter topics or people that I’m interested in, I just search on Listen Notes and add a few episodes to my master playlist. This is similar to how I used Wikipedia’s keyword search!

Oftentimes, I search people’s names on Listen Notes. For example:

• Want to learn basic concepts of a new programming framework? Search for the name of the creator of that programming framework and binge listen to their podcast interviews! Examples: Evan You of Vue, DHH of Rails
• Are you meeting an investor in Silicon Valley? Search the name of that investor to know a bit about them! Examples: Mike Maples, Adam Draper
• A company just got acquired? Search the name of its founder to learn the journey of this company! Examples: Chris Wanstrath of GitHub, Zach Perret of Plaid
• See a historic event discussed on Twitter? Search the names of the people involved! Example: Charles Manson
• Deciding whether to buy a book or not? Search the author’s name! Examples: Nir Eyal, Elaine Pofeldt

Second, I look at the Listen Real-Time page, where it displays what people are listening to on the Listen Notes platform. Every time I stare at the Listen Real-Time page, I’m amazed at how versatile podcast contents are. I often find interesting episodes from unknown podcasts that have zero reviews on Apple Podcasts.

See what podcast episodes are being listened to right now, via Listen Real-Time

Third, I take a glance at the latest episodes of my bookmarked podcasts. A Listen Later playlist can have both episodes and podcasts. I typically sort those bookmarked podcasts by the latest published date. These are the podcasts I like, but it’s unlikely that I’ll have time (and interest) to listen to every new episode of them.

So far, I’ve bookmarked over 70 podcasts . Note: I can’t subscribe to 70 podcasts; otherwise, it would be too overwhelming with tons of unplayed new episodes :)

Take a glance at the latest episodes from bookmarked podcasts

Fourth, I might stumble upon random episodes or recommendations. When I login, the home page of Listen Notes shows a random episode. I do come across unexpected gems from time to time. This is like clicking en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random to get a random Wikipedia article.

Get random episodes from Listen Notes (need to Login first)

Also, on the sidebar of each podcast page (Example) or episode page (Example), there are up to eight recommendations.

Episode recommendations

Fifth, Listen Note Chrome Extension suggests podcasts associated with the websites I visit. I built this Chrome Extension because I always wonder if a particular website (or a company) has official podcasts or not :) Turns out more and more companies are starting their own podcasts!

Suggested podcasts for a website via Listen Notes for Chrome

Last but not least, I also get podcast recommendations from word of mouth, e.g., Twitter, email newsletters, or recommendations from my friends via texts or email. This is very old school, but it works well for all media types (e.g., YouTube videos, books, news articles).

I never run out of podcast content to listen to from my master playlist. And I never feel too overwhelmed with content.

A few years ago, when I subscribed to around 10 podcasts, I felt overwhelmed when new episodes of those podcasts started coming in — not every episode was worth listening to. So I quickly piled up unplayed episodes.

Now, I’m mindful to only pick episodes that I actually want to listen to. I get to explore hundreds (soon thousands) of different podcasts.

AirPods

I use AirPods to listen to podcasts. Earlier on, I mentioned that I usually listen to podcasts together with my wife on road trips. Actually, we even listen to the same podcasts together when grocery shopping.

It’s pretty easy to connect multiple AirPods to the same iPhone:

Listen to the same podcast with two pairs of AirPods

Does my podcast listening routine sound complex? Well, kind of. But it really boils down to just a master playlist — my audio version of Wikipedia for informal learning.

You can subscribe to my master playlist if you want to listen to whatever I listen to. Or you can start your own master playlist: https://www.listennotes.com/listen/

I'm either comfortably retired or unemployed, I haven't decided which. What I do know is that I am not yet ready for decades of hard-won knowledge to lie fallow. Still driven to learn new technologies and to develop new projects, I see the experience and results generally getting better over time (I swear I am not an optimist by nature). I now have the time to work on what interests me, and at my own pace.

The rate of change in technologies has increased markedly since I started my career writing code in a 4GL. The UI back then utilized extended ASCII, 80 characters wide and 50 lines long. It was a much simpler environment, and I could whip out a reasonable complete custom business application in a week (though back then when I was younger, an "easy" week was 80 hours). Changes to operating systems, languages and hardware did happen, but on a scale of months or even years.

I later moved from MS-DOS, to Unix, to Windows, to Unix again, to Mac OS, and now I'm back to Unix. Whereas I once developed applications, I now develop websites. I no longer code in C++ or Java, but (mostly) in JavaScript. I once considered myself very expert at C++, SQL and XML; now I mostly work with NoSQL, GraphQL, JSON and a bit of YAML. Though still competent in many areas, the whirlwind that moves at web speed means I'm not very expert at anything the way I used to be.

"Ok, Boomer, so what's the point?"

First of all, I'm Generation Jones. So watch it, kid.

What I'm getting around to is that just about every former colleague I'm in touch with that excelled at programming is still programming. To be able to do that for decades, you have to remain open-minded and adaptable, because the technological rug gets pulled out from under you all the time.

Learning does get a little bit harder the older you get (the memory's intact, but the recall's a bit sketchy). What experience gives is a grasp on how new jigsaw pieces fit the puzzle, and how to spot and avoid a fad or a failure from a mile away.

"What does this have to do with writing?"

Okay! I'm getting there... jeez.

I've just admitted I'm not so much an expert on on anything anymore. However, with all the new techs popping up every five minutes, there's plenty of bleeding-edge stuff that nobody is an expert on...and that there is a niche, my friend.

To exploit it one must: learn, research, suffer, take notes, research more, suffer some more, give up, stubbornly try again, and eventually succeed. That is called experience, which is not the same as expertise, but it is valuable nonetheless.

When I start to learn about something new, I begin by casting a world-wide net (web?) looking for somebody, somewhere that can clue me in as to what I should be doing. If I wind up empty-handed, I know that that somebody is going to be me. So I start working it out on my own, cursing the entire way.

Sometimes clues can be found in documentation, but for new stuff the docs are: 1) missing; 2) lying; 3) incomplete; or 4) unfathomable. Then I have to ask newbie questions on forums and technical support message boards, trying not to sound like an idiot (which is generally assumed by the by those responding). If I still don't get an answer, I know that I'm really on the bleeding edge.

Just so you know, I hate the bleeding edge; the bloody edge is fine--that's just a bit back from the bleeding one. Life is not near so exasperating on the bloody edge.

"So you admit you are an impostor."

Well, yeah, but hold on just a one sec...

I don't dissuade my readers from thinking I'm an expert, but I don't conceal that I just might be learning this stuff as I go along.

This brings me around to my penultimate point: the process of writing about something forces me to learn it better. I'm okay with being an imposteur (fancier French word that sounds cooler than it is), but I don't want to be a dummkopf (German word that sounds exactly like what it is). So I try hard not to write something totally wrong and stupid.

Sometimes I make a bad assumption or overlook some side-effect, but if you're too scared of embarrassing yourself, you miss the opportunity to get a deeper and more complete understanding. Occasional little dummkopf errors you made will be pointed out to you in comments, which you must acknowledge, correct, and move on. Everybody goofs, even the experts.

Finally, and most importantly, writing offers the opportunity for readers to learn something faster than author did. We should all follow DRY principles, shouldn't we? There's no reason for some poor anonymous fool to make the exact same errors that you, the writer, already made for them.

So try it! If you're not a good writer, and good editor will help you become one. I recommend Hemingway as a start. And thank you, Dear Reader, for allowing me to share!

Keeping up to date and constantly improving is part of the job of a software engineer.

There are lots of ways to study new things on the internet like MOOCs, tutorials, and articles. However, sometimes a physical book is the best choice, especially when it is a "reference" that provides knowledge that will last for the years to come. We can put it on our bookshelf and go through it every time we feel it is necessary.

This is a list of reference books I keep on my software engineering bookshelf. I hope it can be a source of inspiration for everyone looking for something interesting to read! ?

What I have on my bookshelf

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

This is a classic.

In this book, the so-called "Gang of Four" present the 23 design patterns that drove the Object-Oriented world for decades. New patterns have been created since then, but the ones in the book are considered the foundations of all other patterns.

It is not an easy read, but you should have a look at it just to understand where to find what you need on every occasion. Keep it on your desk, and go through it when you are building something and have the feeling, "What I'm doing sounds familiar." You will probably discover that you are trying to implement a design pattern already described in this book.

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

I read this book many years ago, but it has stuck with me since then.

This is a great source of best practices to produce clean, readable code and avoid code smells. The book is focused mainly on Java/OOP, but lots of advice can be applied to every language or programming paradigm.

Writing maintainable and readable code is not a luxury -- it is something every good software engineer should aspire to. This book will provide you with the knowledge to make that happen.

Uncle Bob can be a little extreme sometimes, and I don't agree with him on all of the presented techniques. My suggestion: read it, and take with you only the things you feel are right. In any case, it is a book worth reading.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!: A Beginner's Guide

This is a book on the Haskell programming language, so why buy it and keep it as a reference? My reasons are:

• It is a very well written and easy-to-read book on a not-so-easy topic like functional programming
• It gives you the foundation of functional thinking, not just Haskell syntax
• Haskell is a very elegant language and I like it

This is the book that introduced me to functional programming. Right now I program mainly in Scala, but the transition has been a lot easier after learning the basics of Haskell.

Functional programming is not easy, but it will open your mind. It can be very theoretical, and put it into practice using Haskell will help a lot.

There are also very nice drawings in the book, so you have no excuse not to flip through it. ?

Category Theory for Programmers

This book covers Category theory, which is the foundation of the functional programming paradigm.

The topic is quite complex for non-mathematicians, but the author has put great effort into making it understandable for developers. I admit that I had some difficulties reading it, but I would like to go through it again.

This book is not required to become a great functional programmer. Read it if you like challenges and want to go deeper on the theoretical foundations of functional programming.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

This is my favourite, maybe because I love distributed systems! :-D

In this book, Martin Kleppmann describes all the various aspects of distributed systems, from serialisation to consistency models and consensus, passing through the various database engines. He also explores new trendings regarding data-driven applications.

In a world of cloud-native microservices-based applications, it is fundamental to know the various aspects of a distributed system. The knowledge provided by this book is not tied to a specific technology and will be valuable your entire career in software engineering.

Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

I'm reading this one now.

Are we finished once our software is sent to production? Nope, that is just the beginning!

This book highlights what can go wrong after the software is put in production and has to face real users. It describes anti-patterns that can undermine the stability of our software, as well as solutions to such problems.

What I like the most about this book is that every chapter starts with an example taken from real life. Then the author analyses the problems that caused the software to fail in production. I think learning from concrete examples is a very effective approach.

Introduction to Algorithms

What can I say about this book? Just buy it and keep it on your desk.

If you are a software engineer, there is a high chance you had to study data structures and algorithms. It is not always easy to deal with complexity or to choose the right data structure.

When doubts arise, open this book and you will find what you need for.

For most people (including me) this is a very hard read. I usually just read what I need to know at that moment, and keep the book in sight on my desk.

Hyperfocus: How to Manage Your Attention in a World of Distraction

This is not a technical book, but it is in the set of readings that changed my life in better.

Our work as software engineers consists of solving problems with our minds. To be effective in this task, we need the ability to completely focus on the problem we are solving.

Here you can find lots of suggestions and techniques to maximise the time you can focus on a task. The author discusses also the importance of letting your mind wander when you need to be more creative.

Mastering how to use your attention is something that will improve not only your performance at work, but also every other aspect of your life.

What I will add to my bookshelf

The Pragmatic Programmer

This is one of the most famous books in software development.

The suggestions and techniques presented in this book influenced the careers of many developers and engineers for the better. The book was been published in 1999, but it is now available as new and updated 20th-anniversary edition.

You can't miss this. :-)

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

It is hard to always deliver high-quality code. Deadlines, urgency, a bad day all affect the quality of your work.

That's why refactoring is so important. If we couldn't provide quality the first time, we can improve it later for better maintainability. Martin Fowler (one of my idols in the world of software development) describes the best techniques for an effective refactoring.

There will be always space on my bookshelf for books that help me write better code.

Conclusion

This is my list of must-have books on software engineering. It is by no means a comprehensive list of "important" books in this field, and I'm sure I will add more and more books in the years to come.

Hopefully I gave you some nice tips on the next book you should read. ?

See you!?

In tech, constantly learning (both in and out of work) is an unstated job requirement.

When I was growing up, I would go to the bookstore with my dad every weekend, and every time he would pick up a new book on coding. At the time, I always asked why he was working on the weekends. Now I understand, because I now spend my weekends the same way.

Working in tech requires you to constantly learn new skills. The industry moves so quickly that those who do not continue to learn fall behind. Continuing to succeed at your job is dependent on your ability to learn, but it can be an overwhelming prospect to finish a long day of work only to go home to study.

So how do you do find the motivation to study and ensure that the time you spend learning is productive?

#1: Set a Goal

Set a SMART goal (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time based). It will help you structure your thinking. For example, a general goal would be ‘I want to learn how to code.’ A SMART Goal would be ‘I want to build a website with HTML and CSS in the next 6 months.’

• Specific: Going from ‘learn to code’ (general) to ‘build a website using HTML and CSS’ (specific). This should be something which motivates and focuses you. What do you want to achieve? Why?
• Measurable: How can you track your progress toward your goal? Does writing a script count as ‘learning to code’? Think about how you can measure your progress toward your goal. If it isn’t measurable, it’s a lot easier to get unmotivated. Something like ‘build a website using HTML and CSS’ is much easier to track your progress toward.
• Attainable: Think realistically about your own limitations. If you’re used to coming home and watching TV every day for 3 hours, you’re probably not suddenly going to start coming home from work every day and spending 3 hours studying. That’s okay. Don’t plan for very dramatic change – it’s very hard to make that kind of change sustainable.

Instead, think about small changes. Plan for 30 minutes to spend on a new skill. Think about what you’ve accomplished in the past and if this goal is achievable for you. This is also a good time to think about whether or not you are overcommitting. Are you trying to learn Spanish, play the Oboe, and learn a new framework all in the next month? Pick one thing and stay focused on it. That will make it easier to accomplish one goal, and you can always choose a different goal for your next project.

• Relevant: Is this goal relevant to what I want? For example, if your goal is to become a software developer, what are the top skills you need to develop? Prioritize learning those skills first. Ask yourself if this the best time for this goal.
• Time-based: The first goal doesn’t set any time limit, which can be hard to motivate yourself to pursue. After all, when you have forever it’s much easier to think ‘I’ll start tomorrow.’ The second goal gives you a hard timeline to accomplish it (6 months).

While it’s definitely harder (and takes more time initially) to set SMART goals, it will save you time in the long term.

In Sprint, the authors point out that all of us have limited decision-making capacity each day. It needs to be conserved for the most important tasks. With the first goal (learn to code), you now have to decide what language to program in, what kind of project or projects you want to build, and when you’re going to do it. The second goal (build a website using HTML and CSS) answers all of those questions for you.

#2 Break it Down

Now that you have your goal, break it down into monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly steps (as far down as you need to go). For the example earlier, if your goal is to build a website with HTML and CSS and you don’t know how to code, break it down into manageable steps. For example:

• Find resources to learn HTML and CSS (like freecodecamp.org)
• Spend at least 30 minutes every day working on programming challenges
• Start building a website and dedicate at least 30 minutes every day to working on it

This is a pretty simple example, but the goal looks more manageable already. Build a website? That seems really hard. Spending 30 minutes every day working on learning a new thing? That’s much more manageable. Pretty much everyone has a spare 30 minutes they can work into their day for something that matters to them.

#3 Block out Time

Now that you have your goal, figure out how to spend a solid block of time on it every day (or as often as you can). Small chunks of time (say 5 minutes) here and there are easy to get erased in favor of other things, or may not be long enough for you to focus on the task at hand.

Research shows that regaining focus after an interruption can take (on average) more than 20 minutes. It’s more effective if you can identify an hour (or even 30 minutes) every day and block them out to only focus on this goal.

This is also why time-sensitive goals are so important. It’s much easier to block off time if you can say ‘this is just for 1 month, or two months, etc.’ Blocking off indefinite time is much harder to do.

Plus, blocking out just a small chunk of time means you can work on your project for the assigned time, then go do something else, knowing you accomplished something. Blocking off specific time to work on a personal project means you can work for 30 minutes, then relax without having to worry, as opposed to working on and off while trying to multitask 6 other things (watching Netflix, checking texts, cooking, etc.) is probably going to end with you even more stressed out and feeling less productive.

Studies show that very, very, very few people can truly multitask (I'm definitely not one of them), and that trying to do so just makes accomplishing tasks much harder. Don't try. Block off time, use it for your project, then do something you enjoy.

#4 Stay Focused

It can be very, very easy in tech to start learning one thing and get side-tracked. There are tons of free resources to learn just about anything and it can be overwhelming, and difficult to know where to start (to the extent that it can be paralyzing and impossible to begin learning everything at all).

Escape some of this paralysis by picking just one goal, and sticking with it. It will be a lot more helpful if you can do one thing well (for example creating a website) than a lot of things just a little (for example, printing 'Hello World' in every possible language). Take time to make sure that what you’re doing is helping you accomplish your goal. Ask yourself ‘Is this helping me accomplish my SMART goal?’ If not, it’s probably time to re-evaluate.

Remember, you’ve already done the hard part when you set your goal. You’ve decided this is important and blocked off time. Now you just need to work on it.

If every time you sit down to study, you have to motivate yourself to do so, you won’t have the energy to study. Making the studying a habit saves your energy for the actual task. Ideally you'll get to the point where you come in, sit down, and just start working, without thinking about it.

Now, go learn something!

Looking for more resources? Check out these really smart people:

• 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person
• So You Want to Work in Security…
• What I learned from Coursera’s Learning How to Learn
• The 30 Hour Method For Learning a New Skill

If you’re learning to code in 2016, you’re in luck — thanks to a huge range of helpful websites, MOOCs, books, and learners’ communities, you’ve got everything you need right at your fingertips.

Whether you want to become a self-sufficient freelance developer, webmaster, data scientist, or just understand the basics of computer science, you’ll easily find resources for self-study.

On Gitter, there are plenty of learners’ communities to get involved with as well — we’ve listed some of them here for you:

• FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp — FreeCodeCamp is an open source community of people who learn to code and help nonprofits. Since its establishment 2 years ago, already over 1 million dollars has been donated in pro bono code to non-profits. With FreeCodeCamp, you can work through self-paced coding challenges, build projects, and earn certificates. Once you finish the first 1,200 hours of challenges, you’ll get to build a series of solutions for nonprofits. You’ll work in pairs, under the supervision of a volunteer project manager and a stakeholder from the nonprofit.
• Open-source-society/rooms — Open Source Society University is a community of students of all levels, completing a comprehensive, project based, open-source computer science curriculum, helping each other and sharing their experiences and code through GitHub the community forums. This is a solid path for those of you who want to complete a Computer Science, Data Science, Game Development course on your own time, for free, with courses from the best universities in the World. The curriculum includes 37 courses in 30 categories.
• Learn-javascript-courses/javascript-questions — “Learn JavaScript with Eric Elliott” is an online course series designed to teach you the secrets pros use to build great apps with millions of users.
• Numerical-mooc/numerical-mooc— “Practical Numerical Methods with Python” is an open online course hosted on an independent installation of the Open edX software platform for MOOCs. This project started in 2014 as a multi-campus, connected course (plus MOOC) on numerical methods for science and engineering. A course in numerical methods with Python for engineers and scientists contains currently 5 learning modules, with student assignments.
• CS50x— CS50 is Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science Course. This entry-level course taught by David J. Malan, CS50x teaches students how to think algorithmically and solve problems efficiently. Topics include abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. Languages include C, PHP, and JavaScript plus SQL, CSS, and HTML. Problem sets inspired by real-world domains of biology, cryptography, finance, forensics, and gaming.CS50 is offered as CS50x through edX — even if you’re not a student at Harvard, you may take CS50 by registering for CS50x.
• saasbook/MOOC — This book and the accompanying free online courses on edX teach essential Software Engineering skills via designing, building, testing, and deploying SaaS Web applications in the cloud. Read what other students have said about the book and course.
• Codingforeveryone — Coding for Everyone are community chatroom of organization run by Founders & Coders — a free full-time coding course in the UK. Founders & Coders developed a peer-led model of learning. After completing the course, students are encouraged to join the freelance community and to contribute to a growing array of community activities, including the course itself.

Are you looking for something else? Check out our Explore section or easily start your own learners’ channel here.

Did we miss an channel that you think should be featured? Drop us a line in the Gitter HQ and we will add it to the list.

Happy learning!