Podcast Episode Details

Maintaining Your Skills

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Episode 24

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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

• • 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
    • Published on 6 years, 11 months ago