Skip to main content

Studying and developing as software development professional

As everybody in software development knows, or should know, that studying and experimenting is something one must do to stay on top of the game. That said this time I'm writing about my experiences and ideas of studying. In this post I'll be covering different methods of studying and how I feel about them and what other types of resources are available.

Reading a book

Reading a book is probably the most traditional way of studying and I do read a few books every year. To me this is a way to learn theory and principles of something but usually little to nothing to do with the actual implementation. This type book I usually read in a week or two and I like these books when their length is reasonable somewhere between 50 and 250 pages.

Reading a book with exercises

These are very common type of books in software development. These usually cover some theory and the exercises bring a pragramatic approach with what one can learn a basic implementation. Some of these books are good if they have good examples but a great number of these type of books are way too long to keep me interested all the way to the end.

Attending a online course

I'm currently attending one, actually my first one. This course contains several video lectures per week split in to 2 to 10 minute pieces, quizzes after lessons and homework that's validated instantly.  To me this seems to be a great way to learn. Video lectures contains theory and implementation examples, quizzes are questions of the theory or implementation and homework is implementing and that gives a pragmatic approach to the topic. On the other side this type learning requires quite a lot of time per week.

Working through a tutorial

Tutorials are usually a good way to learn a basics of a framework or a language or howto use a tool. The hardest part is usually to find a good tutorial.

The internet

The internet is full of different resources to use. I follow several websites that collect news, tutorials and blog posts e.g. dzone and infoq. I also follow people and feeds on google+ and twitter and these are a great way for me to share interesting news and posts with others.

Conclusion

These were my thoughts about studying and developing myself. There are probably other ways of learning that I didn't cover here or haven't tried leave a comment if you have one in mind.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simple code: Immutability

Immutability is a special thing that in my mind deserves a short explanation and praise. If you're familiar with functional programming you surely recognice the concept of immutability because it's a key ingredient of the paradigm. In the world of object oriented programming it's not as used and as easy to use approach but there are ways to incorporate immutability to parts of the code and I strongly suggest you to do so. Quick intro to immutablity The basic idea of immutability is unchangeable data.  Lets take a example. We have a need to modify a object's property but because the object is immutable we can't just change value but instead we make a copy of the object and while making the copy we provide the new value for the copy. In code it looks something like this. val pencil = Product(name = "Pencil", category = "Office supply") val blackMarker = pencil.copy(name = "Black marker") The same idea can be applied in functions and metho
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple code: Readability

Readability, understandability, two key incredients of great code. Easier said than done, right? What one person finds easy to read and understand another one finds incomprehensible. This is especially true when programmers have different levels of understanding on various subjects e.g. object oriented vs. functional or Node.js vs. Java. Even though there are obvious differences between paradigms and programming ecosystems there are some common conventions and ways to lower the barrier. Different approaches It's natural that in programming things happen sequentally e.g. you can have a list of objects and you need to do various things to the list like filter some values out and count a sum of the remaining objects based on some property. With the given list const stories = [   {name: "authentication", points: 43},   {name: "profile page", points: 11},   {name: "shopping cart", points: 24},   {name: "shopping history", points: 15},   {name: &qu
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple code: Unit tests

Unit tests are the developers number one safety net. Let that sink in. This is the number one reason for writing unit tests. Unit tests are written by developers for developers to ensure that the code works as expected and handles happy and sad paths correctly. With enough unit test coverage the tests enable a safe environment for refactoring and rewriting code. Unit test scope Unit test should test a single thing, a method or function call and it should test only one use case within. In other words a unit test should test a function with a single input. This is a important guideline to understand. When a unit test tests a function with single input it makes the test isolated, repeatable and predictable. Example of good tests: @Test fun findsAddress() {   val address = findAddress("Stevens street 35", "Southport", "Australia")   assertThat(address).isNotNull() } @Test fun doesNotFindAddress() {   val address = findAddress("Stevens street 697", &q
Post a Comment
Read more