3 Tips On Becoming a Self Learning Software Developer

Career

📅 April 02, 2018

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⏱️3 min read

“If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.” By Zig Ziglar

Have you ever wondered the way you approach learning needs to be dramatically upgraded that saves time and avoid effort to pick up new technologies or methodology?

Heck for front end developers there is something that's called the JavaScript fatigue due to the increasingly amount of new JavaScript technologies that is popping up like rabbits every single day of the week.

Here's 3 tips that had turn me into a self learning developer which landed me a job as a Full Stack Developer.

1) What's Your goals?

It could be as simple as to earn more money or be recognised as an authority for that piece of technology or methodologies. Write it on a blank piece of paper on what's your S.M.A.R.T goals to achieve it.

For me i wrote down on a piece of paper to become a Django Developer and land myself a Django related job within 3 months. Which lead me in borrowing "Two Scoops of Django" book from my friend and going through youtube tutorials from Coding for Entrepreneurs, Chris Hawkes and other PyCon Django videos.

2) Be Committed

Writing down your goals and reasons is great so questions is how do you force yourself to be committed to it then?

One way is finding someone who's interested in the topic to join you to learn it together with you. It could be tech meetups or just a online community of learners like freeCodeCamp, Youtube Channels like LevelUpTuts or listening to podcasts like Software Engineering Daily.

The other way is actually spending money on an online courses like Udacity, tech conferences, workshops or seminars. This is actually my preferred way of learning cause you get to pick their brains from successful experts in that topic. Plus a nice benefit is that you get to network with like minded individuals that you could provide value to or vice versa.

Lastly there's always a bunch of tech meetups, workshops or tech conferences that constantly requires speakers to share their knowledge and skills to the community.

Be one of them even if it's for free you gain knowledge by teaching what you had learnt. This allows you to be recognised as an authority due to your understanding of the topic and you bring good will to your community which opens doors to you in future for better speaking engagement or jobs for that topic.