I've managed to stay in touch with what is happening in the React world, the Node.js world and also keep on updating my engineering management skills. So recently some colleagues asked me to share my sources.
Learning New Skills Quickly
Whenever I want to learn a new topic, I try to find a hand full of domain experts – people who are really top notch in this field – and learn from them. Usually by following them on Twitter, reading their Blogs and subscribing to their newsletters. And then I practice. It's incredible how quickly you make progress when you have some direction from domain experts and put in time and effort to practice what you now know. Just 2 weeks of this make it possible for me to start having in depth conversations about the topic.
Oren Ellenbogen has described a very similar approach at a conference talk. I fully recommend watching this.
Right now my most important source of info is Twitter. Here I have a few people I'm following
React & Node.js
Technical Excellence & Tech Entrepreneurship
Newsletters
With my newsletters I like to have a mix of content from individuals who write their own blog posts and curators who link to many different blogs. Keeping updated with the content of an individual allows some consistency and I understand their references to previous content. Curators allow me to open my mind to new content continuously
Kent C. Dodds has a focus on testing & React. You can subscribe to his newsletter at the bottom of the page.
SoftwareLeadWeekly by Oren Ellenbogen is helping me stay up to date as a manager and tech leader. Oren also has a book, which I found ok but it didn't influence me too much. His mailing list contains info which is more geared towards managers, but I believe that any engineer profits from that knowledge.
LeadDev also has a great newsletter (at the bottom) focussed on all sorts of tech leadership topics. They also organise some wonderful (virtual) conferences which I previously attended.
Stefan Judis has a very humble tone in his newsletter. He writes stuff which is just fun to follow and very relatable.
X-Team has a curation of usually technical documents. What I find interesting is that they highlight blog posts as well as useful GitHub repositories.
From Engineer to Manager
I've previously written about even more resources which help with the transition to becoming an Engineering Manager
Cover photo by Scott Evans on Unsplash
Top comments (6)
You might want to check daily.dev as well :)
Yes they are awesome so many good articles and blogs in one place.
Thanks for this article, nobody tells about it yet. One more question: how to get to know what I doesn’t actually know yet?
I afraid that there are still some low-level knowledge that everybody but not me already knows.
With seniority the way to think about learning changes. For the first 3-4 years you learn what most others know, then you start packing your own path.
No two very senior people know the same stuff. Sometimes you have a production incident which can prompt you to go deeper on a specific topic. Or you do research on an architectural challenge with the goal to not just "make it work", but really make great architectural decisions. Compare yourself to yourself 6 months ago and decide where you want to be better.
What's also worked for me was to explore new principles. E.g. functional programming with RxJS or model based testing. My twitter feed also always brings up new interesting concepts I don't know yet.
It is amazing. Thank you very much.
Nice Article 👍🏻