Hello World!

Yeah, the world is big. Too many people creating and developing new technologies every day. It's hard to keep up with every new trend that appears. Some of these technologies become new standards and some others don't. How could we tell which worth to invest more time learning about? That's a hard question, the only way to figure out is from experience and the wisdom that comes with it.

Study, Study, Study...

I'm working with web development since before 2005. I've learned more technologies than I can remember. Many of them are already deprecated, some of them remain useful. To keep the sanity on IT studies, one must be systematic while doing that. I learned that in a hard way and will tell you about what is helping me nowadays...

Logging the daily activities

After many years I noticed that I haven't any study system, and I lost many of my prototypes and studying material. Too much useful resources were completely forgotten. Them I realized that, as a start, I could log my readings. And I did that here: GitHub Issues - Readings Log.

The "readings log" helped a lot and it's still a good resource for myself. When I need to review a subject, I open that single page and do a browser search. What I find is a temporal and contextual log of links, and instantly my memory helps me remembering what I've learned these days.

Platforms and the habit

Platforms offer easier or harder ways to input and consume information, the GitHub issues seemed like a good option for me at that time. Nowadays I post my logs on a Slack channel dedicated only to my work journaling:

Journals are a great tool for logging studies. I'm using it to log everything, much more than links. It's not perfect but it's very practical. Before GitHub issues or Slack, I've tried many different platforms, even built my own ones. The options to handle this task are too many, but at the end of the day what really matters is the habit of doing it!

The hands-on experience

Studying is not just about readings and loggings, right? To stick the learning deeply in the head we need the hands-on experience.

The "Hello World" programs are traditionally used to introduce a programmer to a new language. "Hello world" is what a very simple program, used to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language, displays on the screen.

I had many poc, spikes, and prototypes made in my life, but just recently I've got the idea of keeping them in a repo: the Hello World repo! Pretty simple, right? Why haven't I thought about that many years ago? Haha. Well, better late than never, I guess. And here I am suggesting you to do the same, your future self will thank you. :)

What about you?

These are my tips for you that are always learning new things:

• Keep a log and a journal about your readings. Also writing about your knowledge can be a great learning experience.
• Get the habit of making "hello world" projects of different technologies before adopting into production. This will help to understand what's that technology strengths and weakness.

What about you? Comment below your study system and the platforms you've chosen!