In the quest for growth material
Various methods I use to gain new knowledge
A few years ago, I started my journey; picture this, a recent undergraduate SW engineer on his first full-time day job. My team mainly consisted of seniors; I saw those “giants” that both have vast product knowledge and tons of it in software development. They even found the time to be up to date with general tech news. I thought to myself, how do they do that? How can I learn new stuff which is not directly learned on the job? What are their methods? How do they find the time for that?
As part of my search for growth material, I’ve tried various methods that work for me, and I still do improve them from time to time. In the following post, I’ll elaborate on them. I covered my time management methods in other posts:
Newsletters
I’ve found newsletters as my preferred way of staying on top of new and relevant software engineering topics. Here are the ones I keep reading every week out of the many newsletters I have tried:
- TLDR Newsletter by Dan Ni. TLDR is a daily newsletter with links and TLDRs of the most interesting stories in tech 📱, science 🚀, and coding 💻!
- Level Up from Pat Kua. Level up is a weekly newsletter for tech leaders. A collection of ten (or more) interesting links on leadership, technology, organizations, and processes.
- Software Lead Weekly by Oren Ellenbogen. A weekly email for busy people who care about people, culture, and leadership.
- The Pointer. A reading club for software developers, curated by Suraj Kapoor. Emailed Tuesdays & Fridays with 6–7 links with a tl;dr for each article.
- Programming Digest, curated by Jakub Chodounsky. A weekly newsletter with the five most interesting stories in programming 👩💻, data 💾, and technology 📱.
- Console by David Mytton & Max Jennings. A weekly digest of the best developer tools and beta releases for developers.
- The Pragmatic Engineer, by Gergely Orosz. A weekly column with advice, observations, and inspiration across the software engineering industry.
The above is what works for me; if you’d like more, head to the awsome-weekly repo with an extensive list of weekly newsletters from the software world.
But.. but, how can you consume that much information?
Our goal is to make reading fun and ensure that the content is relevant to you. If it’s boring, procrastinate. With that in mind, skim before you read!
A learning technic that I’ve learned in my master’s degree for reading (lots of) academic articles and understanding what’s relevant or not.
First, read the headline up to the first paragraph. Then, jump to the conclusion and read it. Fluent recognition of words is the key which improves as you consume more content and your vocabulary is getting larger.
Now you’ll be able to decide if the article is interesting. If it does, go over it again, but this time, you are going to read it while you’ve already established the article’s contextual concept, the essence. Slow down on areas of interest and ignore irrelevant info.
Tech for the rescue
Usually, I collect more articles than I’m able to read in a week. I place them using the 1percentgrowth app by Shem Magnezi:
which I recently switched to from Pocket:
Those apps not only gather your articles but also recommend based on your past readings other hidden gems which relevant for you. A significant benefit of the pocket app is that it allows listening to articles utilizing text to speech engine. This is a true productivity boost. If you decide to use a different service — you can always rely on audioread, which turns your reads into podcasts:
Or if you read on your computer’s browser, the lovely ‘Read Aloud’ extension is helpful as well:
And last but not least is wordtune, which creates a tl;dr version of the article to understand more and faster:
Podcasts
I frequently listen to (Hebrew) podcasts; I usually play them on x1.4 speed, though I try to play with it and see If I can make it to x2. TBH, this is hard. Below is my listening list:
- Reversim by Ran Tavori and Ori Lahav. Probably one of the iconic podcasts for developers. It covers tech, software, and development culture.
- Geekonomy co-hosted by Reem Sherman and Doron Nir. They interview a special guest in each episode, which brings an interesting subject to talk about.
- NoTarbut by Avi Etzioni & Iftach Bar. A podcast about the day-to-day of developers’ teams.
- CyberCyber by Ido Keinan and Noam Rotem. A great way to stay up to date on the recent hacks and cyber security concepts.
- Hitech troubles by Arbel Zinger and Eran Yacobovitch, which, in their words, is about the people of the Israeli hi-tech.
- The big picture co-hosted by Aviad Ben-Yehuda and Nir Sabato. In each episode, this unique podcast covers the business strategy of one tech company.
- BarvazGumi hosted by Vicky Kalmanovich and Linoy Shkuri. Interesting guests that talk about what makes development fun!
- Osim Tochna is hosted by Boaz Lavi, who brings subjects about code, programming languages, cursed bugs, and machine learning.
There are more to listen to, and I try to review the list to keep it relevant for my interests (like the Root Cause, which stopped recording new episodes).
RSS feed
Yeah, I’m aware of the fact this is quite an old concept but still relevant. There are plenty of RSS clients. I’ve found the Feedly free version more than enough for my needs:
I apply the same skimming method. However, since it's about tech news, reading the headlines will give you the gist of it.
What’s in my RSS list? This is where I get up to date with recent tech news, in English and as well Hebrew sites — here are my favorites:
- XDA developers (English)
- Ars Technica (English)
- 9to5Google (English)
- gHacks Tech News (English)
- Gtricks (English)
- Scott Hanselman’s Blog (English)
- Micahel’s coding spot (English)
- TheMarker headlines
- Geektime
- TGspot
- Coffee spot
- Software Archiblog
- Internet Israel
- Tech12
Also, it is helpful to follow groups of interest on Reddit, Quora, or Facebook, but that created an information overload for me, so I’ve decided to stop using them, and nowadays, I mainly follow the Tech Twitter hashtag and focus on reading content by interesting influencers such as Rina Artstain, Ran Bar-Zik, Oren Ellenbogen, Gergely Orosz, etc. The list can go on and on, head to my profile for more.
To conclude
Calm down, don’t stretch your limits. You can go nuts from FOMO ( I didn’t cover Books as a learning source…).
Make sure to ask yourself what’s in it for me or what am I looking to learn here? Protect your time before you start consuming it. Ensure the information fits your expected growth and be hyper-aware of biases (be judgmental).
Explain the content in your own words (I usually tweet about my takeaways). Ask yourself questions after you’re done. Did it remind me of something else? Did it change the way I think? What did I learn from it that I didn’t know before? etc. That way, you can increase the chances it sticks with you, and later, you’ll be able to pull it out.
