I would like to tell you a little bit about my motivation to start a blog.
My employer is pretty generous when it comes to learning. They offer a lot of dedicated time to do learning and also to do open source. They also provide a lot of subscriptions to software licenses etc, and one of the ones that I have taken advantage of a lot is www.pluralsight.com, where you can even get a free trial, which I highly recommend! I will have another post on how valuable pluralsight has been for me, and possibly some reviews and recommendations of courses. But until then, go grab your free trial and try it out yourself!
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I have watched dozens of courses and spent countless hours learning there. John Sonmez of simpleprogrammer.com is one of my favorite content providers there. I would like to say that I took the time to go look him up after I had seen a few of his courses. But, it wasn’t until a year or so later that I started listening to podcasts in the car and heard his name mentioned that I realized that he was well known and followed up to see what else he had to offer.
I started listening to his pod cast library, and looking at the rest of what he offered. One of his suggestions was to create a blog. I had always wanted a place to document my ideas and a place to share my ideas and what I had learned, both inside my company and more broad. So I bought his blogging course which can be found here simpleprogrammer.com/blog-course.
John has a lot of good knowledge to share, even beyond programming. I’ve watched, read and listened to a lot of his opinions on finances, real estate and what he calls soft skills. I think it is a really good idea to keep a good balance in your life and be able to take care of you and your body, outside of your daily work. He has a great book that talks about a lot of this, which you can also listen to on Audible.
Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual
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I think it is also important to get your learning from many different avenues. So I suggest reading books, listening to podcasts, watching videos, pair programming with others, any training that you can find. And, mix it up. Don’t just learn about your primary language or frameworks or architectures that you are working in. Find out what else is going on in the technology world. I will have some posts on some of my suggestions.
