Sat Nov 07 2020
Whether you're currently working in tech or trying to make the jump, something that I keep hearing from people in the industry is that you're pretty much never done learning. The state of tech is such that if you stand still for too long, eventually you get left behind, so it's important to always be trying to teach yourself more and improve on your skills.
And if you're going to be spending your career constantly learning new things, it's important to be able to pick up those things as quickly as possible so you can get back to doing the things you love. This is actually an aspect of tech in which I think coding bootcamp grads actually have a leg up on.
The bootcamp process itself is incredibly intensive and pretty much forces you to either learn quickly or leave. And so anyone coming out of a bootcamp already has great experience in learning quickly. The key is keeping up with learning after you finish.
In this blog I'll go over the things I've done to make learning new tech as quick and efficient as possible.
Now obviously everyone's brain works differently and things that work for me may not necessarily work for anyone else, but I think the best the way to figure out what works for you is to try what works for others and adjust where necessary.
So let's get started.
The best way for me to learn something is by just doing it. This sounds obvious but the point i'm getting at here is that you don't need to be a master at something so be doing it so learn as much as you need to get started and then start doing it! You'll learn a ton more from coming across a particular problem yourself than you will from reading someone's description about it. Now obviously you can't get by with just the basic knowledge of a technology so you'll have to complement that with other resources like technical docs, and video tutorials.
When I need to learn a new technology my first priority is to find some sort of beginner level tutorial. I've used blogs, technical docs, video tutorials, and I tend to prefer the videos.
Follow along in your own environment until you feel like you have a decent grasp. If you want to finish the tutorial, great! If you don't have the time, don't worry, you can always come back if you get tripped up.
Once you feel good enough to go off on your own, that's where the real learning begins. You'll quickly come across errors that you don't know and things you don't know how to do. So how do you get around these obstacles? Google! Google your errors, google your questions, read the stack overflow posts, read the blogs, and read the technologies docs that come up. This is what you need to get comfortable doing because this is what working in tech is. The problems you're seeing now will probably be much simpler than problems you'd see in a professional environment using the tech but that's okay! You're new! What's important is that the method you use to get around the issue will be the same.
On the job, if you come across an error you cant figure out, what do you do? Google it or ask someone! the same thing you need to be doing when you're first learning. And that is the key because you're never done learning. Even when you've learned enough to get hired somewhere, sure you're getting paid, and you might be pretty good at what you're doing, but you're always still learning.
The way my bootcamp taught was through lectures, yes but those were mainly to reiterate the information you learn through their readings and labs. We would be assigned readings on a particular topic and followed by the reading would be lab projects that we'd clone down to our computer and code out the solutions. This was an incredibly useful system and I think it really helped me get a handle on the topics being covered. This kind of learning, articles paired with labs paired with lectures really provided me with a solid base to stand on for these topics. They got me to a point where I could then go on to keep using the new technologies on my own and get even better.
A platform that's very similar to a coding bootcamp and I always felt had a great educational system, is FreeCodeCamp. FreeCodeCamp provides a very similar framework of giving you a short reading about what they'd like you to do and then to move forward you need to actually do it. It is a little hand-holdy at first in that they'll tell you exactly how to do something and they have you do it, but I think it works well for their system because eventually they kick you out of the nest and say now go ahead and build a site on your own and give us the link. I remember first going through their curriculum a number of years ago when I was first trying to get into code, and I was so impressed by their curriculum and how it was structured. I think their way of teaching really meshed well with how I learn things. Holding hands through the basics and then force you to go off on your own.
But there's not always a free resource like freecodecamp and you probably don't have the money to drop on a 4 month bootcamp for every new topic you want to learn. Thats where sites like Udemy came in for me.
Udemy has cheap video courses on pretty much everything. And if the course isn't cheap, wait a couple days, they're always having sales. I remember I wanted to buy a particular course that was listed at $119 and there was no way I was going to spend that much. I ended up checking back a couple days later and it was on sale for $12.99.
I've used Udemy courses for so many things, CCNA? Udemy courses. Minecraft mods in Java? Udemy courses. Data Structures and Algorithms? Udemy courses!
Now with every method I've mentioned here, I've found that none of them on their own was entirely sufficient on it's own. When you're trying to learn something new, you need to try as many things as you can and stick with the ones that work best to build your own personal curriculum. And once you know which methods work for you, you'll be able to teach yourself anything you set your mind to.