Do you think you should be ready for your next step, one of the first thing you should do is start preparing for the interviews, and the technical interview questions, most of the time the questions are quirky and not trivial, and not the type of think you will be facing in your daily work, this mean that you need to start looking for interview questions and star to memorizing all the questions and the answers. Since some times the companies still using legacy software and legacy versions of the software, you might fiend yourself programming with old version of the languages, then you'll have to start to study and learn the latest of the language(s) that are written in your resume. There should be a better way to keep up with the technology, what if instead of waiting for the moment that you decide it is time to find a new job, you spend 15-30 minutes every day doing spaced repetition learning (see below), the technique that doctors use to memorize and keep knowledge fresh. If it works for doctors (doctors have to memorize 20x more than a developer), it should work for software developers. In general ideally you should improve your soft skills and your technical skills. For your soft skill I'll recommend Soft Skills by John Somes, this book is an eye opener, there are some things that you might already know, and other advises that you need to learn, I totally recommend it, it can change your life.





Note: I bought the Audio book, since I do long commute to the office, it is a nice way of spend time in traffic while learn, I consider it more productive than listen to a radio station. Click in the link below.





Do you think you can memorize all the aspect, syntax, quirky part and techniques of all the languages that you have experience, or the one you started to learn, one or two weeks before your interview?

I don't think it is a good idea, that's why most peoples fail they first one or two interviews when they start doing interviews again. Another advantage of been prepared all the time even if you are not looking for a job right now is, if you find yourself at a layoff, there is almost no way to predict if your company are going to do layoffs.

How to keep the knowledge fresh always?

Lets say you are a fullstack web developer, so, to perform your job you use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and C#. For this example lets assume you barelly write vanilla javascript, because you are using Angular with TypeScript, and you barelly use plain CSS, because you use SCSS or another pre-processor with bootstrap, which provide a several number of css classes ready to be used, with time you'll forget things like:

the result of typeof null is equal object, this might not seem important for your day to day work but is might be your next interview question for your next step in your career.Or how to center a div with css, without using any bootstrap helper?

Are you familiar with the spaced repetition learning technique?

The spaced repetition learning is about retention in time, see the following graphic.





Here is a video with more information.





What to do?

Possible solutions are to use platform of flash cards or multiple choices quiz. If you do a search in google you'll find a lot of resources to keep up with your favorite languages, this is some examples:

I created my own quiz platform to practice and improve my dev skills, I wanted to share it with you. You don't need to install it to taste it , you can try it online to see if it is something you like or not, so you don't waste value time, just sing in as guest and you'll be able to interact with some of the features and quizzes, for the full experience, you can install it from the google play store





Currently "Quiz Dev" includes 11 topics for *free (this is going to be a growing collection), the questions have been extracted from the internet, most of them are available free in http://quizbucket.org/ and others web sites on internet as well. Here is the link to the google play:





These are the currently available quiz/topics in the application

C#

AngularJs

JavaScript

Html

Android

C++

CSS

Java

NodeJs

PHP

Python

More topics and/or programming languages are going to be included in the near future.

* Hand crafted premium content will be available soon, keep your app updated, you will be notify when new content is available.

Note:

Since the app was done using the latest version of ionic framework, it is possible to create a version for iPhone, but since develop for ios is costly (need a expensive Mac and there is a $ 99 fee to publish an app) I'll wait until the app gather enough interest form iPhone's users to make it available on the apple app store. If you are an iPhone user and you are interested in the app, please leave a comment on this post, or contact me directly.

I'm also planning to include flash cards to the app in the future, any feedback is more than welcome.

Developing your own ionic 2+ app?

If you are developing your own app with ionic and are stuck, or need help with something (this environment can be tricky) please let me know and I'll be more than happy to help you.

Here is an article I recently wrote about the Error 10, when you user the google plus for sign in plugin.

Any question or suggestion, please don't hesitate to contact me.



