5 Tips to Teach Yourself Anything in the IT World

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Continuous learning is a necessity and a challenge to most of us. Companies invest a lot to upskill their workforce to stay relevant. I am sharing my experience and viewpoint about “How to do smart learning?” and importantly “How to keep yourself motivated?”

Remember the following:

1. Foundation — These are something you gain over a long period of your life from schools, colleges, and/or being around wise people. There are no shortcuts
2. IT Foundation — These are something you gain either in your college if you are part of IT related streams or during company trainings for freshers. These intense training takes months and years. The stretch depends on how far you want to go — be it becoming a developer, administrator, security expert, architect et al. Again, there are no shortcuts.
3. Ride the wave — This is the place where “smart learning” pays off

Typical examples of ride the wave is

1. Cloud computing — AWS, Azure, GCP, and so on
2. Architecture and Design — Microservices vs Monoliths, SOA, Microfrontends and so on
3. Frameworks — React vs Vue, Spring vs Micronaut, Laravel vs Symfony, and so on
4. Databases — RDBMS vs NoSQL
5. Never-ending hypes, libraries and tools

1. Decide the role you want to play first — Influencer vs Follower

Based on whether you are an influencer (supporting decision-maker) or a follower, the priority order would change. Eventually, you need the answer to all

• What? Why? When? and Where? — Generally falls under the architect’s role
• How? — Generally falls under developer role

Many times, the choice of a platform, programming languages, and products are based on the investment the company has already made, the “future” road map, and the market situations. So, you may not get a greenfield project every time.

2. Skip lines while reading

It’s ok to skip lines while reading any IT books or manuals 😆

Of course, not OK to skip the real line 🚌 🚅

There are no closed book exams in work (except few rare positions). So, there is no point in crunching all the information in a single go. Instead, scan through the details from high level to the level required on a need basis.

In case, you learn through video sessions — don’t watch minute-by-minute and definitely not at 1x speed 😄

3. Make the best use of online resources

The goodness of open-source technologies is that you can practice without boundaries. This act of “kindness” is spreading in the hosting solution (cloud) world. Cliche — Practice, practice, and practice.

Listing just two online services to show what I mean

1. Try Redis
2. Code Sandbox

Similarly, almost all cloud providers giveaways a few micro-compute worths of resources for free — with or without credit cards.

4. Get the work done

Getting the work done is more important than “picture perfect” completion. So don’t be harsh on yourself 😊

If not convinced —

• Check Vue 2 vs Vue 3
• Check Angular 1 vs Angular 2
• Check JDK 9, 10, and 11. Oh, you didn’t find any difference. Maybe because they have given a picture-perfect solution already (just kidding)

Evolution is bound to happen and scale can differ. Reviews and endless feedback loops are OK, as long as they help to shape the product.

Situations like these could make you feel like a foreigner for a given period

• Mastered in React, but getting into a Vue project
• Spring framework is your strength, but getting into a Micronaut project
• Certified in AWS, but getting to work on Azure 😅
• and so on…

Move past the initial hiccups and become a native/pro.

5. Entrepreneur mindset

• Provide value — Not just a tick-mark to the so called “best-practices”
• See a product idea in every opportunity — Not just as project work.
• Fail fast — Learn how to recalibrate and kick start again.

Conclusion

I hope you have found these tips useful. Is there anything else you can think of? Let us know in the comments.

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