How To Accelerate Your Learning As A Software Developer - Read Time: 3 Mins

📅 June 03, 2018

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⏱️3 min read

Introduction

Daily there is massive amount of technology changes, software methodology or even new project management paradigm that will disrupt the way we do our job.

So learning to accelerate your learning as a software developer to adopt new technology or skills is actually considered a prized skill as a software developer. Besides upgrading your soft skills.

Adopting A New Perspective For Learning

First of all i would ask for you to be open minded and perception about learning. Which traditionally mostly has been conducted in the classroom enviroment during our formative years.

Which has become a poor vehicle to grasp information or learn new skills. Especially when we had graduated from school and stepping into the working world as professionals for afew years.

Partially because of time commitment that we have to allocate to learn new skills and the constraints in our budget for high quality curated materials.

That allows us to pick up new information to get our job done or just purely to deepen our understanding to do our job better.

Quest to Learn Better, Faster, Stronger For me after trying out multiple ways to learn new things. It actually had came down to me these 3 ways for you to learn effectively as a software developer.

Trial By Fire

The first one forces you to either test out your knowledge in a controlled enviroment or through real work scenarios to create or develop prototypes for your users which solves a problem.

It could be bootcamps, hackathons, taking nanodegrees from coursera or having just a side project. Building something that uses that technology helps.

Birds of a Feather Flocks Together Being part of professional or non-professional groups provides a lot of opportunities for you to learn. For example you get to pick the brains of people, who you might not be able to gain access to unless your working with them directly,

The other opportunity is organising events or conferences that benefit the community as a whole. The chance to speak on topics that you feel is interesting allows you to gain exposure as a expert that actually opens doors to you for future speaking arrangements.

The Automobile University

The last way to learn for me is probably what some people call it "Automobile university". Which is listening to podcasts, audiobooks or watching videos whenever you have idle moments in the day, while your commuting from point A to point B.

You actually learn a lot of things using your idle times like to taking advantage to learn new technologies or skills from Youtube. Engineers.SG has a wide range of awesome videos from tech conferences or past meetup groups.

Conclusion

These are actually some of the ways i had learned myself over the years. Ignoring all the various learning methodology, you might had come across like blended learning.

At the end of the days, it comes down to focusing on either one of these ways to learn. Which i personally prefer the 'Trail by Fire" despite it's intensity, which offers you a lot of learning experience.

How To Accelerate Your Learning As A Software Developer - Read Time: 3 Mins

Introduction

Adopting A New Perspective For Learning

Trial By Fire

The Automobile University

Conclusion

Links

Engineers SG

Coding Tech

Chris Hawkes

Software Engineering Daily

Junior Developers Singapore

Python User Group

Association Of Professional Sales

Singapore Computer Society