Shownotes Transcript
Happy New Year! 2019 has just kicked off, and so has another year of podcasts. In this episode we discuss maintaining your skills after long periods away from your desk. This is the perfect compliment to the recently completed holiday season as many of us are just now getting back to work. Segment 1 - Keeping Things in Practice
Keep using the technology you deem valuable
The main way I stay on top of my skills is seemingly an obvious answer. By using them
This can be a little difficult though with so many technologies out there and as we’ve mentioned many times it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the choice
What I try to do is choose projects that will incorporate the technology I value
Sometimes this requires convincing your employer and contractor to adopt something they are not familiar with. So it’s important to be knowledgeable of the positives and be very clear with the downsides right from the get go.
Recently I’ve been proposing using Vue.js for some contract projects
Keep up to date with updates
As technology evolves it usually get a wider feature set and perspective of when to use it can change
I try to stay on top of technologies such as node, Vue.js, react and read their change logs. If a new feature gets announced I try to figure out where I can use it and how to implement it (usually using the documentation). Even if I don’t implement it just by going through the exercise of figuring out how it works I retain a little bit of that knowledge and will more likely know to come back to it when a new project pops up.
Segment 2 - Combating the Loss of Knowledge
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When you’re away from your desk for a long time, you’ll become rusty at your everyday tasks and may completely forget new things that you learned just before leaving
Furthermore, there are often times that certain snippets of code are used a single time per project and therefore don’t stay fresh in our minds because we rarely see them
It’s easy to stress over losing knowledge like this because we invested time in learning new skills and in a few short weeks they could be completely gone from our memory
There are a variety of ways to combat this, but it’s not something to stress over as it’s just a natural procedure that our brains do that is out of our control
Recording Snippets
Programmers of all kinds, whether it be web developers, game devs, or even hobbyists all have some sort of snippets manager
Often times these take the form of a snippets managing software, but it can be as simple as keeping old projects and files laying around in a folder somewhere
One key component to generating snippets is that your code is modularized rather than proprietary for each application, meaning you want to code up functions that can be used over and over again - If you have an application that uses AJAX for example, there should be an AJAX function that you can pass arguments into, rather than AJAX being done somewhere inside of another multipurpose function
Snippet managers are great when you code up something that you know you will use repeatedly, but rarely need to interact with directly
Example 1: You make functions that access and interact with an API once, then you focus on making the application using the data that comes from that API
Example 2: You make a collection of CSS buttons that you use on a variety of projects
Personally, I use a bunch of old projects and files inside of a folder because I always think of the project I did something in, in the past, rather than the name of a generic function. However, I’d like to build up a snippet library in a formal piece of software
There are a bunch of snippet managing software out there, I haven’t used any personally, but some of the ones that came up in a quick search include: Boostnote (https://boostnote.io/)), Cacher (https://www.cacher.io/)), and Bracket Snippets for Brackets (https://github.com/jrowny/brackets-snippets))
Letting Selective Knowledge Go
One of our programming teachers in college said that he would selectively let knowledge leave his brain once he had learned and implemented it
Specifically he was referring to a driver that he had written for a microcontroller that we were using in his lab class. He said that he only needed to learn the information for certain parts of the driver once, implement the driver they way he wanted based on his new knowledge, then he forgot about that specific piece of information he learned because he had already gotten from it what he needed
This might be a hard pill to swallow, especially since things take forever to learn when we’re new to them, but it’s a valid statement
If you think about it, if you were working at a company as a Ruby on Rails developer and suddenly got changed to a different team that exclusively uses jQuery for their projects, you’re going to forget Ruby on Rails pretty quickly if you don’t keep your practice up on your own time
I like to think of it as, I learned something to gain value in some way, expended that value to its fullest for my given situation, then moved on.
Web News - 2018 in Review, Road Ahead to 2019
2018 Podcast Download Numbers
July - 72 downloads
August - 378 downloads
September - 973 downloads
October - 1234 downloads
November - 1683 downloads
December - 1569 downloads
2018 total: 5909 downloads
2018 Spotify Stream Numbers
July - 0 streams
August - 84 streams
September - 333 streams
October - 618 streams
November - 718 streams
December - 686 streams
2018 total: 2439 streams
As of January 7, 2019
Instagram Followers - 448
Twitter Followers - 60
Facebook Page Likes - 57
2018 in Review
Higher numbers than expected across the board
Podcast was supposed to be a side thing in comparison to templates, snippets, etc, but has become a staple of HATT
Learned a bunch of social media tips and tricks, with a focus on Instagram, secondary focus on Twitter
Goals for 2019
Over 2k Instagram followers
Monetization of HATT through multiple means
Create a developer community through HATT where people can meet other developers going through similar paths to them, finding people to work with
Mikes Goals
Go all in on vue.js
Get a youtube tutorial series up
Become comfortable with webpack and code splitting
Matt’s Goals
Master CSS Grid
Start something on YouTube (Webflow guide? Something else?)
Further my knowledge of social media
Amass to: Get a steady passive income stream setup and running
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