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: Contracts

Code works around contracts and contracts should be carefully thought and crafted. What are contracts A High abstraction level of contracts for code are API's. They define a interface that is basically a contract that the producer and consumer of the API agree to use to communicate with each other. Two common forms of API's are libraries that are used in code and external API's  that are used via HTTP, RPC etc. When thinking in a bit deeper contracts consist firstly of functions, methods or external endpoints and secondly of data, more precisely on data models and data types within the models.   Defining contracts Contracts should always be defined with careful thought. I've come accross few times to someone saying that "this is for intenal use only so it doesn't need to defined and/or documented as thoughtfully as a public API would be" but I disagree with that. The same care should be be given to internal and external contracts because the contracts are
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple code: Functions and methods

What makes a good function or method? I don't think it's a single thing but a combination of things where each is significant. If one the things is flawed it affects to all others and the whole function is flawed. So what are those "things"? Have a meaningful name Function should have a name that describes it's purpose or functionality. When a function has a meaningful name it's easy to read and understand what's it's purpose. Let's take a example. If function's purpose is to find a customer by it's id a good name could be findCustomerById(id: String) or it could just as well be just  findCustomer(id: String) because the function signature implies that the customer is found by it's id the word find also implies that the customer might be found or it might not be found. If the function's name would be changed to getCustomer(id: String) it's meaning changes because now it implies that there's no fallback, the customer is e
2 comments
Read more