More Opportunities to Use Your Daily Work for Continuous Learning

Not everyone has the luck to work in interesting projects that allow you to learn while doing your job. Some companies do not even define their technology stack, meaning you don’t know what technologies you should learn. Do not despair; you still have many options to build up your knowledge while doing your work.

 

Dependencies of your project

If there is no list of technologies and tools you should use, start with the dependencies of your current projects. Those dependencies offer functionality your projects need and knowing them will help you to use them more efficiently.

For .Net projects you find the dependencies in the packages.config files. You can read them one by one and start with the libraries you find most interesting. Or you can write a small tool that runs through all projects and sums up the dependencies it finds.

Don’t spend too much time on creating that list, use your time to learn those libraries.

 

Debugging

If you don’t have a full automated test suite you will need to debug your application a lot. To know how to debug effectively will save you a lot of time – most likely in a critical moment where every minute counts.

Every new Visual Studio version offers more and more help for debugging. When did you last check what your version of Visual Studio can do? You can start there and learn all the new capabilities.

The same is true for OzCode. If you use this great tool for debugging, you should visit their site and watch the videos for their new features – many are simple and a great help (like Reveal)

Do you use ReSharper Ultimate? It comes with two great tools for debugging: dotMemory and dotTrace. They can help you to pin down memory or performance bottlenecks in no time, but only when you know how to use them.

Debugging is an undisputed part of your work as a software developer. Therefore no one is going to object when you try to get better at it – a chance to put that newly gained knowledge to action will come quickly.

 

Other tools

How well do you know your version control system? Are you satisfied with your level of knowledge or do you fear certain situations? Gaps in your knowledge are best closed in a test repository. There you have a safe environment to learn the ins and outs of your version control system. The effort you spend there will be quickly paid back if something goes wrong on your production repository.

Do you use a ticketing system? Those are another kind of systems that only get more complicated. It is not uncommon that features you are missing are already built-in, but you just don’t know about their existence. Should this be the case, learn those features and then share your knowledge with your team. It may prevent you from adding another system to fill the gaps.

Those are two examples that explain the idea of using the tools you use regularly as a learning opportunity. You may have more tools that fit in this category and some of them will offer additional learning opportunities you could pursuit.

 

Reading and typing

As a software developer you read and write a lot. Improving the speed of those two things will have a big impact on our work. Learn to touch type, so that you can use all your 10 fingers to type and stop wasting time with the hunt for the location of a specific key. That is not so much a problem when we write code, then Visual Studio offers great code completion. The few characters you need to type don’t make a big difference. However, when we don’t write code the speed matters and we spend a lot of time in Word, email or Slack.

Reading has an even bigger impact, then we read a lot more than we write. Again, the biggest amount of reading we do outside of an IDE. All those specifications, memos, reports and so on demand our attention. To read them faster with the same accuracy can help us to spend less time on the boring tasks. There are many approaches for speed reading, but not all are a good match. You need to experiment with a few until you find one that works for you. The many documents your company produces are a great training opportunity – and no one expects that you read them in your free time.

 

Benefits for your company

You don’t need to learn for the sake of learning. Learn the tools and libraries your company paid for so that you are able to use them well. It is a much bigger waste to pay for tools and frameworks that no one uses because the developers have no clue how they work. That sounds ridiculous, but unfortunately this is more common than you may think.

You don’t need to spend hours each day to start with those activities. Spending 15 minutes a day will be enough and that amount of time can be found without difficulty.

 

Conclusion

With all those examples you now have many possible starting points for your learning activities. Each and every one of those is directly linked to your work. The next time you have a few minutes to kill you can start with learning any of those libraries or tools. Doing that instead of checking Twitter or Facebook will not only help you to use your time much better, you get into the habit of learning without the need of cutting your sleep. Try that and let me know how this influenced your work.