DEVELOPMENT BLOG
A blog to discuss development related topics.
December 8, 2015
As many of us are, you are likely knee deep in either the new features for the next release of the product you're working on, or perhaps you're already past that and in the defect phase of the software development lifecycle, pushing towards that code-complete, feature-complete or beta milestone.
Either way, your time is at a premium and you (like most of us) find it difficult to do more than you're already doing.
Often, this becomes a time-management problem. You may be saying that you don't have the time to spend on research and career development right now, so you'll do this later. The problem with this approach is this often leads to never as there is always something more pressing that needs to get done.
Perhaps you're on some hot new agile development team and you're working 40 hours per week and focusing on consistently delivering items in your product backlog to keep your team's velocity at a consistent level. Or, you may be like many out there that haven't yet transitioned to agile, working on a waterfall project putting in 60-80 hours per week and find it difficult to keep focused on all of the items on your plate, much less try and take on any more.
In my experience, I've found that spending just a few hours per week learning either a new development language, a new skill, or just reading up on the latest and greatest development trends, technologies or design patterns is well worth the time spent.
It provides a nice break for your mind, when you feel like you're going 100 mph with no end in sight and it helps keep you hungry and looking for the next big or cool thing that you can do in order to be innovative and make that new feature requirement improve customer satisfaction, make it easier to use, or perhaps make it much nicer to look at.
The key here is variety. If you keep yourself focused for too long on a single thing, your focus will actually lessen and shift to other things as most of us tend to get bored staring at the same thing day in and day out. So, spending just a few hours a week learning something (really, anything) new, will help keep your work focus strong, it will keep your mind fresh and looking for new and exciting ways to innovate or improve performance or quality for your customers.
I've found a few interesting websites that you can use to learn at your own pace, when you make time each week to learn something new. My personal favorite is Udemy.com as they have a huge variety of courses and they are on-sale often enough that you can buy several when they go on sale and add them to your learning list.
Learning Resources: