Dodging the meteor

Rethink your self-teaching to avoid becoming a dinosaur!

Transcript

2. $ cat .profile | grep export export GIT_AUTHOR="Florian Gilcher" export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="florian.gilcher@asquera.de" export GITHUB_NICK="skade" export APP_NET_NICK="skade" export GITHUB_ORGANIZATIONS="asquera,padrino" export TWITTER_NICK="@argorak" export TM_COMPANY="Asquera GmbH"
3. http://asquera.de
4. “How did you learn all this?”
5. How do accomplished programmers foster their learning environment?
6. I decided to pass the question around.
7. How do you learn?
8. Whats your favourite trick?
9. Learning is a skill like any other.
10. It can be learned.
11. “I believe consistent, regular and hard work is a sure way to become better at a skill.” – Michal Taszycki, http://programmingworkout.com
12. Learning by doing.
13. Get into a habit!
14. -- clear the table DELETE * FROM table;
15. How much time does it take you to get back to a learning project from last week?
16. Anything above 1 minute is too much.
17. No need for an elaborate system.
18. Only one that works.
19. # purely for reading # and compiling src/ # things I actually work on Code/
20. After every major update, I make sure that everything compiles and works.
21. vagrant, ruby, java, Haskell Platform, TexLive, erlang, postgres VMs, Riak VMs, CouchDB VMs...
22. Setup time drags you down.
23. Find ways to make that possible for all kinds of things.
24. Be your own favourite ops guy.
25. “Its like going to the gym: I never go in the evening if I didn’t pack my things the day before.”
26. Now that we’re time-efficient, we still need the time.
27. Work and learning effort are completely different beasts, don’t mix them.
28. Work: time constraints, deadlines, product goals.
29. Learning: freeform, failure as default mode, no pressure.
30. Work-Life Balance
31. Work-
32. Work-Learn-
33. Work-Learn-Pastime Balance
34. Don’t allow anyone to control that balance.
35. “Learn the stuff you need for work at home.” –A former boss
36. Now that work is ruled out, where to look next?
37. “I got more conscious about how I consume media.”
38. “I started skipping things aggressively.”
39. Media consumption
40. Information epidemic?
41. TV, YouTube, Hacker News, Twitter, yourfavouriteblog
42. Get used to writing off things.
43. Game boring? Skip! TV show bad? Switch of the TV!
44. Don’t switch it on without knowing whats running in the first place.
45. The essence of focus is to do everything very consciously.
46. Superchargers
47. I. Vocabulary
48. “I read a lot of literature, but skip implementing for a while.”
49. It allows you to digest new material or read code.
50. It allows you to talk to people actually working on the described things.
51. Knowing your vocabs allows you to think about them.
52. It breaks your personal filter bubble.
53. II. A taste for quality
54. “Even when just messing around, I strictly apply all best practices I know.”
55. class Fuck def args 'bla' end end
56. class MyClass def foo 'bar' end end
57. “I don’t care, its just demo code.” – sadly, another former boss
58. If your code is messy, your brain is messy.
59. Keeping your code clean will get easier and easier with every time.
60. Its easier to show to other people and helps you communicate with peers
61. III. Learning Hydra
62. “I usually learn many things in parallel.”
63. Always have tasks of different interests and difficulty levels around.
64. Enlightment can strike at random.
65. “Free” time is learning time!
66. IV. Take huge strides
67. “When I want to learn a new technology, I always set an ambitious goal: the problems popping up along the way are part of the exercise.”
68. You get exposed to unpredicted problems.
69. GOOD!
70. Only planning small steps can make you wander off in the wrong direction.
71. V. Go nuts!
72. Build the mad things! For fun and no profit at all!
73. Can JRuby be embedded into JRuby?
74. Hell, yes!
75. It might yield a system where you have 2 different classes called “Object”...
76. ... but you learn a lot about JRuby internals.
77. VI. Pass your knowledge along
78. “I’ve always helping others with my skills.”
79. Explaining to others exposes flaws in your own thinking.
80. You haven’t understood what you cannot explain.
81. Start answering questions on mailing lists, boards, twitter, stackoverflow.
82. But do it in a proper, detailed way.
83. VII.
84. Every once in a while...
85. Disconnect your ethernet cable
86. Disconnect your ethernet cable Disconnect your Wifi
87. Disconnect your ethernet cable Disconnect your Wifi Turn your phone in flight mode
88. VII. Go offline
89. It forces you to work with what you have.
90. It forces you to find solutions for what you don’t have by yourself.
91. Google == Training Wheels
92. Google is a great helper, but you should work without helpers once in a while.
93. Dodging the Meteor?
94. In 5 or 10 years, none of us will program like today.
95. I come from planet LAMP...
96. ...which is now mostly empty.
97. What will hit Planet Ruby/Rails?
98. Haskell?
99. Clojure? Scala?
100. Be on the lookout!
101. Constant learning is the only thing that keeps you from becoming a dinosaur.
102. Google == Training Wheels
103. Big thanks to: @paulca, @aq, @johnashenfelter, @brennandunn, @ernestomiguez, @myabc, @febeling, @catimogen, @zebel, @Xylakant, @mmack, @bascht, @wikimatze, @cypher, @mehowte