How to Improve Your Skills and Become a Better Developer

The best resources I have found online during my quest to improve my knowledge.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

The world of technology in general, and software development in particular, is ever changing. And it’s changing fast. If you want to avoid becoming obsolete in a few years, you need two things: passion for what you do, and continuous learning. But while passion is something that comes from within you, and, to paraphrase a famous Italian writer, “we cannot give ourselves passion, if we don’t have it”, continuous learning is something that can, and must be planned.

The fundamental factors which distinguish a highly skilled developer who assimilates the theoretical concepts and is able to transfer them into profitable products/services from your run-of-the-mill nerd who survives thanks to copy-paste from Stackoverflow are:

• starting off in the best possible way when it comes to learning new concepts.
• having access to the right resources.

There are literally tons of courses, tutorials, videos, and podcasts on almost any topic on the internet. How do you find the right one? Simply typing keywords related to the topic you are interested in into the Google search bar, then sifting through the first two pages of results and jumping straight into study mode often turns out to be a huge waste of time. How do I know this? I’m an electronic engineer and a software developer, and I ended up in these traps several times before understanding that:

• having everything at your disposal is very much the same thing as having nothing available.
• Valuable resources often don’t appear within the first few pages of search engines, so you need to look for them carefully.
• Looking for such resources is not easy, as it requires time and effort.
• Time and efforts initially “wasted” to select quality resources is repaid in terms of final quality of learning.

The best resources I have found online during my quest to improve my knowledge of technical and technological topics are platforms offering courses whose quality can be likened to that of university and post-grad courses called MOOCs (Massive Open…