I was talking to a good friend of mine yesterday about developing ourselves as.. well.. developers.
I do a lot of work with things like that, but there’s so much I simply don’t know how to do or even where to start. My problem is a classic one for any junior level developer and I think that, even if you’re a senior dev, you can appreciate this question:
WHERE DO I START TRYING TO LEARN THIS @!#!$?
Seriously. It’s unnerving. “Hello World” is too simple, so I get bored, but I don’t know enough about the language to do much else and, depending on what you want to accomplish, there are so many paths to what you want, it boggles the mind. What should I do? What should any of us do?
The good news is that my friend introduced me to some things like teamtreehouse and tutsplus.
It makes me wonder why more companies don’t have these sorts of things internally to develop their people. I’m trying to develop one for my people and more importantly to develop myself. The thing is, I don’t want master every single detail, but I want to be expert enough. Namely, I want to learn and have my people learn what will help them do their job well and then, on their own, extend that knowledge.
How do you pick out what’s best to know right now from all the things that can be known? Depends on the business and the processes there.
Let me ask you: do you have a training trace in place to keep your employees moving forward and to measure where they are in terms of their expertise? If so, I dare say you are 3000 steps ahead of the game.