I’ve had the good fortune of spending a sprint with one of Compare the Market’s teams in London. Working with this new team has been a fantastic experience, and the welcome I received reminded me of just why Compare the Market is a great place to work. Whenever I spend time in another team, however, it also reminds me of something else — how little I know. In the last year or so I’ve learnt several great hacks that have completely revolutionised the way I learn. Here they are:

Learning hack 1: Know Why You’re Learning.

Whenever someone asks why I want to learn new things, my first answer is obvious. I genuinely love learning. This is true, but there is a problem. In our lives as developers we probably only know about 1% of the stuff that there is to know about development. And what we know about development affects our job performance, career prospects and sense of self-worth. So let’s try something else: Prioritise learning based on strategic objectives.

But what are those objectives? Well, in part that’s dependant on what you want to get out of the time that you spend as a developer. Here are some common themes:

Becoming a master of the tech you use at work, which will make you an invaluable member of the team.

Keeping up with the latest and greatest, which will help you bring new ideas into the team and stay employable externally.

Learning more about a technology that you would like to pivot in to

Be careful though, it’s easy to think about learning as just about learning about tech, but to be honest find that I spend more of my learning time thinking about:

How do I help/teach/empower those around me?

How do I make my work environment better, rather than complain about it’s flaws?

And you should be thinking about those things too.

Once you know why you are learning what you are learning, you suddenly realise that you are learning the wrong stuff. Are you learning React because it’s trendy while working towards promotion in your angular job? Stop that.

Learning Hack 2: Know What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know.

Once you know why you are learning things, you might encounter another problem. Say you realised that you wanted to become a master of Node.js to widen your skillset and land your dream job. You’ve learnt the basics but don’t know which frameworks, patterns and practices that you need to learn? Here’s where you can find out:

Medium.com

Seriously there’s loads of blogs here by developers. and in those blogs they often mention specific technologies and frameworks that are upcoming. A great example would be Sebastian Eschweiler’s full stack road map. But seriously, there’s someone out there for every tech you can imagine.

Reddit and Twitter

Sometimes the best way to learn about new tech is just to be part of the discussion. My first interaction with Electron for example was someone posting a smarmy meme on r/programmerHumor. In fact, almost all the tech I know is stuff that I’ve encountered organically — through discussion, rather than gone out of my way to research.

Try and make your organic discovery of new ideas fit your goals, you can do this easily by thinking about who to follow. If you’re planning on pivoting your career from frontend to backend for example, make sure you follow backend devs and tools on twitter or sub to r/node.

Another thought, if you’re wondering who to follow on twitter, you could always follow me…

Go to a meetup or like, make some friends.

I know lots of developers, every one knows a massive bunch of stuff that I don’t. It’s amazing just how much you can learn just by talking to other people in your field. What’s better is this is often way better than what a book can tell you because other people have various hacks that don’t often get published. Better still, they can make their guidance specific to problem you are facing.

Learning Hack 3: Log and Prioritise

You’ve now gone to all the effort of working out what goals you are working towards, and put out feelers to prevent necessary technologies slipping under the radar. Good for you.

At one point I would have considered this job done , but I encountered two problems:

I left too many learning tasks incomplete. It took so long to get round to learning things that things often slipped my mind and became lost.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a system where we could log what work needs to me done and prioritise it so that we know what to do next?

Good news, that’s literally a Kanban board.

And here’s mine:

Ok, you need to squint at this to call it Kanban, but if you do squint you’ll see that the ‘tech learning’ and ‘meta’ columns combine to form a backlog. The started column clearly maps to ‘in progress’ and publish is like ready to deploy. In my personal case deploying is adding it to my CV or tweeting about it or writing about it on medium.

You could also put a done column here, but I prefer to just archive completed cards.

Trello also has the amazing power to let you label your stories. I label them with the goals that we identified in learning hack #1. The whole process of labelling helps me consider how important specific tasks are and I can then drag them up and down in their column for priority.

Now you might say, woah, this looks like loads of work! But it’s not. Adding a new card literally involves whacking open your phone, typing the name in the correct column and dragging it upwards until you see another card that is higher priority. Done.

Learning Hack 4: A Sad Truth, Proving What You’ve Learnt Is As Important As Actually Learning It.

A while ago I read a book called ‘The passionate programmer’ by Chad Fowler. In it, Chad answers the age old adage “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” His answer is one of the best answers I’ve ever heard: “Who cares”.

If you’re applying for a new job for example, is the hiring manager going to consider your application more highly because of the tech that he doesn’t know you’re an expert on? Are you going to be promoted based on the area of expertise you never mention?

The simple fact is that you need to be able to prove what you know, there’s many ways you can do this — through a qualification or certification, starting an open source project, taking part in an event where you teach or talk about it or by blogging about it on medium.

One last thing

If you thought this article was helpful why not hit the follow button, comment with your thoughts or clap the article. Every time someone engages with my work it tells me that there is a market for me to do more. That and it makes me feel good :)