One thing that has evolved over the last 20 years or so is the amount of information available to people that want to learn.
When I started in earnest with my software career I was lucky to be going to DePaul University in Chicago after an Associates from a local community college, but I also worked at Motorola a long time before they were a Lenovo company. One of the perks of where my office was (a few miles from Motorola HQ in Schaumburg, IL at the time) was proximity to Motorola University.
This was a building on that campus and they offered a ton of classes – a lot of them followed the basic outline you’d find in O’Reilly books of the time. I took courses on Perl, SQL, Visual Basic, etc. I had great support from my manager, and things were good.
Through that era it turned into “what O’Reilly book do I need next to learn?”. Then APress came, I started to get into some early certifications (when it was still Sun Certified Java Programmer!). It was great – but so many books!
The last 10-15 years have really seen an explosion of things like Stack Overflow, Khan Academy, Coursera, Udemy, and even schools like MIT offering courses you can audit online.
At my current company we have a Udemy Enterprise account – and I’ve dabbled on on off for a few years. I love grabbing a group of people and starting a study group – we’d track our progress, answer questions, challenge each other. It was a fun way to get like minded folks that wanted to use this learn things like Python, SQL and Ansible. We did small classes, and got ambitious with large ones on topics like AWS Solution Architecture.
OK, so what’s my point? We’ll in January 2024 I was on Udemy looking for the next thing to do having set a New Years resolution to take a few courses and Udemy had a challenge – something like do a 12 week streak to start the new year. OK, game on.
Well, still going strong!
I’ve taken a lot courses in that 68 week stretch, and I have the same formula for each. I open a new google doc and take notes along with the course. If it involves doing something, I’ll have an IDE or other needed tool ready and will do it. I think hands on active engagement helps more than just watching a video.
So as I continue this journey, I’ve thought about my favorite courses I’ve taken – and wanted to summary my notes and leave some comments about it. I’ll come up with some template I think, and might use chatGPT to summarize my outlines to make it easier to read instead of copy/paste – but the point is I liked a lot of these and if anyone finds these posts – maybe it will help them too!
Stay tuned as I catch up on some of the older ones, and then continue as I do new things.
I will make it 100% clear where I used tooling to summarize my outlines. I keep them all in my personal GDrive, so if anyone ever has a question about a class – feel free to shoot an email to me. Happy to dig out the notes and talk about my experience in more detail!