What Have You Done Lately Outside of Work?
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item What Have You Done Lately Outside of Work?
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A good friend told me years ago to think of a subscription to a quality training service, such as Pluralsight, as an investment in myself rather than a cost. There are loads of low cost and free resources too. I have found that Pluralsight courses and their authors suit my particular style of learning.
Answering questions on Stack Overflow and other tech forums is also educational. Teach once, learn twice.
I find that friends and ex-colleagues (many are both) come to me for help. I may not know how to solve their problem but I do know what approach is likely to do so. Often they want to find the solution for themselves, it is the approach they are after. I ask them to share the solution when they get to it. Their problems are often interesting. It boils down to putting in the effort to maintain your professional network.
Asking polite questions on LinkedIn of and social media of the guiding lights of our profession will get some good answers. For example, Allen Holub posted a piece saying that TDD/BDD could not be considered a test strategy. As is the way with social media he got flamed. I set him a polite Twitter DM asking for clarification. He gave me a detailed and well thought out explanation that converted me to his view. Always thank people who take the time to do that.
The tech world has grown so vast and there is so much going on it is easy to become directionless and spin aimlessly. I find the Thoughtworks Tech Radar useful as a direction of travel indicator. As an international consultancy their radar is based on their experience across their client base. If I've got time for social media I've got time to include tech news sources in my reading.
The important things to remember are
- Adopt the habit of doing a little, regularly. Regular is as good as often.
- This doesn't have to be a penance, it is to help you in your career, not suck the joy out of life
- Quality over quantity
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I do radio as a hobby (yeah, I know, I'm worse than a cross-fitter, I won't shut up about it). The fun thing about the hobby is that you can do the most ancient of radio broadcast CW, morse code, or all sorts of wild new digital stuff (and yeah, technically CW is digital too, but you know what I mean).
I also have been messing around with Arduino-style controller chips since my last sabbatical (I decided to start learning electronics). That lead me to LoRa, long range low power radio transmitters built for controllers. You can use these to set up mesh networks and then do Internet-of-things style controls.
So... yeah, crossed all the streams. In my spare time, at night (don't want to get in trouble with work), I am working on getting data (currently just temperature information) from an electronic chip, through the controller chip, on to the network, into Azure, and ultimately into a database, right now, PostgreSQL. It's mostly, but not completely working.
Most of this is just me having fun at my hobby, bashing around with technology I barely understand. However, because I'm able to loop databases into it as well, it's acting as a learning opportunity for areas where we at work are trying to expand into. Ultimately, I plan to be able to give talks on radio and arduino at data conferences.
TL/DR: I'm using my hobby as a way to learn more for work.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore RooseveltAuthor of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning -
I hesitate to share my experiences at working outside of work, because I'm not like Grant or Steve, who've done well with their learning. And I assume like David Poole as well. My work for work's sake hasn't brought me advances in my career as I had hoped it would. It hasn't brought me recognition, either. It has helped me get a job after being laid off. So, think of me as a middle achiever.
I am a lifelong learner. I love to learn, for learning's sake. And I try to use what I learn either for projects at home or in my job. Like David, I pay for a Pluralsight subscription.
A large part of the reason I think I'm only average is because I live in an environment which has some strange cultural norms. For example, mentoring isn't valued in my community at all. As far as I can tell it never has been.
In my current position I can't practice what I learn on Pluralsight, unless it is the simplest concept, because no one will use it. For example, I am currently in my second Pluralsight course on WebAPIs, this one using .NET 6. I know this it is better to break up the functionality of an app into discrete components (don't go overboard with that, though), so that you can write components which can be used by other applications. I did this successfully at my previous job, using APIs (with an older technology), which we would consume with reports, Windows apps, and web apps. It was great. But where I work now no one wants to write APIs or consume them. They would much rather write the same routine repeatedly. A hundred times, if necessary. I don't know why, other than the excuse, "We've always done it this way."
This leads me to a conclusion that it is helpful, for me at least, to have an environment which is willing to try new things. That way you can write something others can use or use something written by someone else. I don't get that here. I've been trying to find some people who I could work on a project with but haven't been too successful at that. A couple of years back I contributed to Humanitarian Toolbox on GitHub in a very modest way, but to be honest with you they're lightyears ahead of me. So, I'm going to try to find another GitHub open-source project I can contribute to, which hopefully isn't lightyears ahead of me.
I do attend my local user group meetings, whenever I can. Which is most of the time.
I've noticed that there are no Microsoft MVP from my state. At least that's my perception. I don't know why.
I keep learning and studying, even if it doesn't get me anything.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
- David.Poole wrote:
A good friend told me years ago to think of a subscription to a quality training service, such as Pluralsight, as an investment in myself rather than a cost.
...
The important things to remember are
- Adopt the habit of doing a little, regularly. Regular is as good as often.
- This doesn't have to be a penance, it is to help you in your career, not suck the joy out of life
- Quality over quantity
Good thoughts. The thing I'd also note is that you should track this stuff. It's good to talk about in reviews/interviews.
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The key to my learning in SQL is that I learned very early on that one good test is worth a thousand expert opinions and taught myself how to make a million row test table of just about any kind of random constrained data that is satisfactory for the given problem.
It did become rather addictive to me. Like I say in my second slide on most of my presentations...
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)
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