Of course, everyone is swamped with work, but you still can find ways to learn to code on the job.
Here's my story.
I used to work as a support engineer at a small company and we had a problem - our clients kept calling and asking the same questions over and over again. They didn't like to read pdf documentation because you could easily lose hours of your time browsing countless pages of complex specialized technical text. So, I decided to deal with this in a way that will fix the problem and at the same time allow me to learn something new.
With the help of some tutorial online, I spent one hour a day building a little help-desk app using Vue and CSS Grid. It looked really simple but straightforward and provided clear step-by-step answers to common questions.
Being good friends with sysadmin we put my little creation online and sent an email for people to check it out. Then things got busy, and we kind of forgot about it for a while.
After some time, my boss called me and said that our clients really liked this new website that we have. They were able to easily find what they need in a matter of minutes right from their mobile phones. He asked me to work on this website full-time, adding new features and various other improvements.
Things like that show your initiative to make things better and also the ability for you to learn some new stuff. And also I got paid for the thing I was building. Isn’t it cool?
So, I'd say find a little side project at work and hone your skills there. You need to build something that is fun to build and solves a real problem that people have. It really doesn’t matter whether your boss knows about it or not.
What matters is the end result of your work. The amount of time that this is going to take is not super extreme but it will push you forward.
This is such a great story, thanks so much for sharing! I've actually had some similar situations at my job where I created some simple Adwords scripts (written in vanilla JS) that made reporting a lot easier for me at the time.
Great article!
Of course, everyone is swamped with work, but you still can find ways to learn to code on the job.
Here's my story.
I used to work as a support engineer at a small company and we had a problem - our clients kept calling and asking the same questions over and over again. They didn't like to read pdf documentation because you could easily lose hours of your time browsing countless pages of complex specialized technical text. So, I decided to deal with this in a way that will fix the problem and at the same time allow me to learn something new.
With the help of some tutorial online, I spent one hour a day building a little help-desk app using Vue and CSS Grid. It looked really simple but straightforward and provided clear step-by-step answers to common questions.
Being good friends with sysadmin we put my little creation online and sent an email for people to check it out. Then things got busy, and we kind of forgot about it for a while.
After some time, my boss called me and said that our clients really liked this new website that we have. They were able to easily find what they need in a matter of minutes right from their mobile phones. He asked me to work on this website full-time, adding new features and various other improvements.
Things like that show your initiative to make things better and also the ability for you to learn some new stuff. And also I got paid for the thing I was building. Isn’t it cool?
So, I'd say find a little side project at work and hone your skills there. You need to build something that is fun to build and solves a real problem that people have. It really doesn’t matter whether your boss knows about it or not.
What matters is the end result of your work. The amount of time that this is going to take is not super extreme but it will push you forward.
This is such a great story, thanks so much for sharing! I've actually had some similar situations at my job where I created some simple Adwords scripts (written in vanilla JS) that made reporting a lot easier for me at the time.
Awesome! Very motivating. IMO it’s a good idea to let your boss know what you’re doing - even if it’s for the purpose of accounting for the time.