Developers around the world ask us a quite common question: How can we keep up with current, ever-changing technology? Developers spend many hours every week trying to do exactly that: learn about technologies, frameworks, APIs, languages, and tools that pop up all the time, hoping that this will amount to keeping up to date with technology.

The problems with this approach are multiple:

• There are too many things happening at the same time, and it is impossible to know which ones are the most important
• Trying to learn many things at once is confusing and you end up feeling tired and overwhelmed by the number of things that need to be done
• Forcing yourself to spend many hours a day doing something that seems never-ending is a recipe for frustration

But there is one thing that gets the crown for being the most frustrating:

• Learning many things that you will not apply right now is not only superficial but the knowledge will neither last nor will it be useful for long

When you learn a new skill, think about how you will apply that skill. Actively search for a way to incorporate your new skill into your day-to-day coding projects. Using the skills you gain right away will help you to build the muscle memory for the new skill and assimilate it into your library of knowledge.

Have you ever spent hours learning something that you are not using in a project right now, and a few months later, when you need it, you remember next to nothing, and have to refresh it? And does that refreshing feel like almost having to relearn everything? There is a reason for that feeling and it is the difference between knowledge and skills.

An effective way to think about knowledge is that it is a collection of memories that are disconnected from each other. Because they are disconnected, it takes some time for you to remember those things when you need them. And once you recover one memory, it does not help you recover other memories. This is like learning about the history of bicycles and how they were invented. Although you may love bikes, it is hard to remember the names and dates and who did what. There is a better way.

Have you ever heard the popular saying that goes like this: once you learn how to ride a bicycle, you never forget? This is because riding a bicycle is not knowledge; it’s a skill. An effective way to think about skills is that they are collections of memories that are connected to each other. Once you recover one of those memories, they all come together and are accessed in a much faster way by your brain.

That is why, once you acquire the skill, you just sit on the bicycle and go. You do not need to remember each fact about riding a bike. It just comes to you, without effort. The most important thing about skills for you to keep in mind is that although you can acquire knowledge by reading or listening, you can only develop skills by doing. There is no amount of reading, listening, watching videos, or following amazing tutorials that will ever get you to ride a bicycle. The only way is to go down to the park and try, fall, try again, and eventually, do it.

This is the same for every developer skill that you want to master. To really learn something, you must do things, instead of simply studying to acquire the knowledge.

When you write your CV or resume or prepare your LinkedIn profile, do you list in it all the books you read and YouTube videos you watched? Do you list all the knowledge you have? Or do you put more focus on the projects you worked on and the experiences you acquired?

Even when just starting, you will clearly be better off including everything you did, even if they were just personal and volunteer projects, because, at the end of the day, it is your experience and skills that really matter.

We started this chapter by talking about how developers spend a lot of time trying to keep up to date, so does the discussion around skills just make it worse? We must spend time keeping up to date, but the outcome we desire is to gain more skills. As we gain skills, we must still do our day-to-day things, so it will take more time, not less!

Sometimes, in order to do things, you need to develop a strategy for doing so. This reminds us of a developer we know named Maryna Savchenko. She is a software engineer, based in Germany, and a true believer in software craftsmanship, clean code, and TDD. She finds intellectual fulfillment in accomplishing hard tasks and is passionate about acquiring and improving skills. When we asked her to share a story with us about learning continuously and shaping her career, she shared that what really helped her in her learning journey is a book entitled A Mind for Numbers, by Barbara Oakley. By reading this book, she figured out her own “learning framework.” Understanding how she learns best helped her to avoid frustration and keep being motivated during learning complex topics. Understanding the best way to learn new skills and gain experience by doing is a crucial step as you continue your path for learning. Let’s hear some more from Mayrna.

After leaving Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, I did not work as a software engineer. I was told that “I do not have it.” And I strongly believed that for some time. When I was offered a job in application support at a software development company, I was glad. I worked hard. I learned accounting by myself (to understand enterprise resource planning systems better) and passed four certifications, only to realize that I was learning the wrong thing. I learned the hard way how focusing on the right thing matters! Why was it wrong? Well, that technology (1C Enterprise) was limited to a number of countries (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan). I could not reuse my knowledge, and working for a company with headquarters in Russia was not right after Russian-Ukrainian War started in 2014. In addition to that, I was making less and less money every day because of inflation. I was paying full price for my wrong decision and for listening too much to other people. At this point in time, I did the first analysis of the Java ecosystem and thought that it may be a good way forward. In the meantime, my husband and I decided to move to Poland from Ukraine. I realized at this time that I needed to think hard about what to do and what to learn next. After one more analysis of the market and technologies, I was sure that Java was a good choice and decided to become a Java programmer. Finding a job abroad without relevant experience is not an easy task. You need to be better than local candidates and prove it. In my case, I needed to prove it to myself also. So, I needed to learn a lot of things, such as the language itself, frameworks, build tools, testing frameworks, databases, design patterns, and so on. In the beginning, I was very slow, ineffective, and overwhelmed. So, I googled how other people learn. Many said they “just learn” and that is it. After some searching, I found Barbara Oakley’s book and it was full of the advice I needed. I also discovered a rich and diverse software engineering community (including Java champions, Microsoft MVP people, experienced software engineers, techno bloggers, and tech educators). It gave me an understanding of what I was doing wrong, and I started to believe in my plan. But looking for a software developer job in Poland was not successful for me. I had only one technical interview. When I tried to send my CV to Germany, I realized how geography matters! From sending 13 CVs, I got 6 responses, 2 onsite interviews, and 1 job offer. And we were on our way to a new country. In Germany, I still needed to learn a lot to level up, as well as the German language. Having a learning framework gave me the right tools and confidence to proceed. Last year, I got promoted to mid-level and started blogging (https://savchenko.tech/). Now, I am living in Munich and on my way to improving my career.

As Mayrna’s story illustrates, sometimes you have to find your inspiration and curiosity to continuously learn. Next, we will discuss how to find focus and priorities to help us identify the skills we need to keep up to date.

Connected to the how to keep up with current, ever-changing technology question that we looked at in the previous section, there is a follow-up that we also hear all the time: Which technologies are important to learn today, and which ones should we prioritize?

This question is a recognition that there simply is not enough time to acquire every skill, so what do you choose?

There is a simple answer to that: Choose to learn something that you need to apply right now.

It may sound simple, but it makes sense. If execution is what develops your skills, then if you prioritize learning about something that you need to use immediately, you will go ahead and use it, which will develop your skill. This is the best way to get yourself to do the skill the fastest. This is simple, but it is not very helpful, is it?

Imagine this. You must do something at work, and your boss tells you to learn and apply it. In this case, what we just discussed could be the right answer. However, that leaves you at the mercy of what your company wants you to do, and someone else’s ideas of what is important. Not a good strategy for an awesome career, is it?

For you to take control of your career—the theme of this book—you need to proactively go after the things that make a difference to you. For that, you will need to focus and choose what matters to you.

And immediately when you hear that, you may feel a tiny bit of anxiety pop up in your head. There are so many options to choose from:

• What if I choose the wrong thing?
• What if the thing I choose is not the best thing?
• What if I miss the important things?
• What if things change?

If you feel like this, maybe it is because you think that the focus is the technology or the tool that you will spend time mastering and developing the skills for. You may be thinking that the focus is, for example, on Java instead of Go or Ruby.

But that definition of focus is too narrow, and not very useful for your career. Choosing an area of your focus is not about choosing a technology or a tool, much less a framework or an API. Choosing a focus is choosing the problem you want to solve. In a way, choosing a problem is a much more specific and narrow focus.

For example, you can focus on solving the very pressing problem of achieving high performance for large, scalable, Java-based finance applications in the cloud.

This is a very precise problem to solve. It seems much more specific than focusing on Java or the cloud.

However, the tools, knowledge, and skills needed to achieve high performance are actually many and varied. You will need to know about Java tools, cloud tools, performance tools, financial concepts, scalable architectures, and so much more!

Well, this seems too much to learn! Aren’t we back to the problem of lack of focus? If you keep the problem in mind, then no. It is the problem that will help you keep your focus.

In our example, you don’t need to learn or keep up to date with everything in Java, just the parts that focus on performance. There's no need to follow every single tool that shows up in the cloud. You will focus on the ones that give you an edge on the scalability needed in the financial world.

Finding your focus is finding an interesting problem to solve that you are passionate about. In the next section, we will introduce a concept to help you.

Here is where the rubber hits the road. Once you know a problem, even if it is a broad idea of what it is, you have a direction to go, learn, research, and dive deep. How can we mention broad and deep in the same sentence, and not make that contradictory? This is what we call just-in-time learning, which is a two-step process. Let us discuss each step briefly in the following subsections.

Step 1 – Have a broad vision of the market

The first step is to have a broad view of the problem you are going after, the tools, technologies, companies, people, and more.

Once you lean toward a problem or direction, even if it is fuzzy and just defined in general broad terms, surround yourself with related information. Your goal is to go broad, to know what exists.

This will be scary because the more you know it exists, the more you will feel there are too many things you do not know. That is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it is a cognitive bias that you can learn to control:

Figure 1.1 – Dunning-Kruger effect

To go broad, use the following techniques:

• Follow people related to your focus on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Search for technologies and projects in that general area
• Talk and connect with people, ask questions, and pay attention
• Attend online and in-person meetups and events
• Subscribe to bloggers in that space

Here, you are looking to have a broad view of the landscape, get a feeling about the terminology, the most mentioned and used tools, the people that are shaping that area, and what they think.

This is a superficial view, but you should also look a little below the surface. When you hear about tools and concepts you do not know, a quick Google search will tell you what they are and what they are useful for.

Keep this in mind: you need to know that things exist, their general usefulness, what problems they solve, what problems they create, and a sense of their popularity. You can use your memory, a file on your computer, a notebook, or even tools such as Anki to maintain your general view of your problem space. This is knowledge, and it is particularly important that you are continuously aware of your problem domain.

One crucial point: this seems very time-consuming, right? If you agree, it is because you are thinking about going deep, and spending hours researching every day. But remember, that is not the point but rather a superficial understanding. You should be aware and connected. You should be paying attention to your area. A few minutes a day, or when the opportunity arises, is more than enough for you to build that general idea.

We can almost hear you say, “This superficial idea will not help me learn things!” And you are right. The objective of being broad is to know what exists. Then, you apply step 2.

Step 2 – Go deep when you are ready to apply

Now that you know what exists, look for opportunities to apply interesting things in your day-to-day coding and development projects so you can experiment with this approach. This can take many forms.

Look for opportunities to experiment with some of those technologies or ideas in your current project. Even if your project will not use these ideas in production, there are many opportunities to experiment with prototypes and test cases, as tools for you to be more productive, or to build a tool for the team.

Pay attention to what is going on in your company. You may hear of projects or proofs of concept that are being considered, customers that need a new solution, or internal projects that need to be implemented. Volunteering to discuss and participate in some of those may give you a chance to apply the technologies you are interested in.

Find things outside of work that you are interested in. Applying skills at work is your best option, but sometimes the opportunities are harder to come by, and you may need to look elsewhere. Personal projects, volunteer projects for a non-profit, or open source projects are all good options.

In all cases, when you see an opportunity to apply your knowledge, this is the time to go deep with just-in-time learning. Do a deep dive into how to use that particular technology or tool. Spend a few hours during the week creating a small prototype, getting something up and running. Your goal here is to get up to speed with it as fast as possible and go as deep as possible in that time.

The objective is not to become an overnight expert but to be able to apply that new idea to a real project.

What will just-in-time learning do to your skill acquisition process?

First, it will give you a broad vision of what exists and what matters to your focus area. That, in turn, will allow you to identify opportunities to apply that technology.

Second, once you find a real opportunity, you will go deep by learning and applying immediately what you learned, and that will give you the skills you need to advance.

That begs a new question: how do we practice?