I’ve recently published . That story was, of course, about how to get to know all these new “shiny” technologies. It was also a bit about learning but it was mostly about knowing these things exist. The question now is: Again, I want to emphasize that you should not jump on the bandwagon of every new technology, first because you don’t need to, and second because this would lead you into tech-fatigue, burning out, a dysfunctional social life, depression and potential suicide (☉_☉). How I stay up-to-date as a Developer What if you want to actually learn them? But suppose you decided to learn this new thing anyway, how do you do it? Step 1 — The theory There are 2 types of learners, the and the . readers watchers If you’re a , the best way to go is usually heading to the website of the technology you wish to learn. It hasn’t been always like this, but today, most websites have great “getting started” and “documentation” sections. Some will even guide you through interactive tutorials. Books are also an excellent way of learning, and I guess they’ll always be. If you are a book person, check out . Great resource. reader Safari Books Online If you’re a , jump to or . PluralSight’s strength is the variety of topics and also the fact that, besides technology, it includes the “creative” part where you can learn Photoshop, 3D Studio Max and a lot others. LinuxAcademy, in the other hand, shines for the hands-on labs, where it actually guides you through doing stuff. It’s not limited to videos, but most of the content is about Devops tools, cloud and, of course, Linux. There’s also , , , , and . watcher PluralSight LinuxAcademy Egghead WatchMeCode Edx Udemy Udacity LernVern Step 2 — The Action This is finally where I wanted go. . You have to do in order to learn. You have to try stuff, break stuff, regret you ever tried, overcome your laziness and get s**it done. I’m not talking these useless “hello world” s**t. I’m talking about building something real and with a purpose, from the beginning to the end. You can do it! The action Also, this is a magnificent way to starting an open-source project on GitHub, if you didn’t yet. When you’re interviewing, one thing that shines is what you’ve done in the past. Now you can not only say you know it. You can show it! And now, the ultimate question: Not everybody is creative. If that’s your case, my friends, then brace yourselves, because i What can you do? t’s idea give-away time! \o/ App ideas — Part 1 These are not ground-breaking ideas, they’re not necessarily new, they’re probably not making you rich, but they’re simple enough for you to be able to execute them from the ground up, on your own. These are not not projects I have seen before (at least the way I imagine them) and they’re at least somewhat better than what you usually find in and . App Ideas SomebodyMakeThis Also, don’t forget to if you don’t want to start from scratch. And if you set forth to implement one of these, please let me know =) The following names are , pick whatever you want. pick up a boilerplate fictional DevBoard DevBoard is a developer oriented news aggregator website with a columns layout like Trello and TweetDeck. The users can set up their own boards picking up columns from multiple sources, like Twitter, Medium publications, Subreddits, Hackernews, Stackoverflow tags/hottest questions, GitHub trending repositories and CodePen picked pens. You can start up small and keep adding more sources as it becomes more popular. This would be an all-in-one replacement for my article . How I stay up-to-date as a Developer I would definitely use it. QuestionMark is especially cool because you can use HTML/JavaScript/CSS to build cross-platform desktop applications. You can use QuestionMark as an opportunity to learn Electron and your favorite front-end stack. Electron is an Electron application for and and . If the user chooses to create an exam, he/she can set up properties like the Title, Duration and the Number of Questions. The exam is saved locally in the hard drive as a JSON file. The user can also choose to create a question. Questions have properties like Title, a list of Alternatives and other properties like Randomize. Questions must be saved as JSON files in the “Questions” folder inside the exam folder. The user can, of course, use this app to actually take and exam. So, even though there might be 2000 questions there, when you select an the exam, if it’s only configured to use 30 questions, these questions will be randomly selected out of the available 2000. QuestionMark creating taking exams certifications Now, create separate repository on GitHub where . They can also add new questions to the existing exams. users can submit pull-requests with their own exams and questions I would certainly use it for studying for my . certifications SparkFlow Many companies, especially those building data-centric business applications, need a Workflow module. In the past, Workflows were synonymous with , but that changed. Services like , and proved that Workflows can be made more attractive by letting go of formalities and making things simpler. However, these services became famous by appealing to the end-user through 500+ app integrations. BPMN Integromat Zapier Microsoft Flow has made a profitable business from an open-source project by combining the love for GitHub with the fact that many enterprises won’t expose their source-code / intellectual property to a 3rd party cloud like GitHub. follows the same business model. GitLab SparkFlow is an open-source Workflow App, focused on being integrated into existing products, not the end-user, with an interface inspired by but without all those App integrations. It has just 4 kinds of element: SparkFlow Integromat : This is one way of starting a flow. SparkFlow gives you a URL and you call it passing whatever you’d like. The passed data is now bound to the flow instance and can be used in to take decisions. Webhook start data Filters : This is another way of starting a flow: Every X minutes, or every day/week/month at a particular time. Timer start : Also known as decision. This, of course, allows the flow to “fork”. Whether or not the flow is going to move in a particular direction depends on the evaluation of expressions based on the flow data (e.g ) Filter AppointmentType == “personal” : Instead of integrating with lots of apps, SparkFlow has only 1 . It calls an API using either basic authentication, OAuth or no auth at all. Because we’re aiming at product integration, we just need to call the target product API and the cycle is complete. API request active trigger The company I work for would love it. App ideas — Part 2 My brain has a thread dedicated to spitting out App ideas. It works in such an extent that sometimes I have to meditate to make it stop ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. There are plenty where these came from. I’ll give them away in if people show interest. future posts, Conclusion The best way to learn is by doing. Unleash your creativity and don’t fear failure. Find some time on your schedule and start being a not just a consumer. You can do it. Also, . Don’t jump from one project to the other. Your brain will try to convince you that the newer idea is always better. Don’t listen to it. Focus. . creator, get things done Delivering is a feature Happy hacking! About the Author I’m , I like writing and building stuff. Recently I built: , a remote job aggregator for developers, check it out! 💗 André Pena https://remoted.io
