Learney — knowledge that fits you
Since last few years, I’ve been focused on different aspects of knowledge sharing within our industry. One of my ongoing goals is to give back to the community through all kinds of activities like running a blog for aspiring developers, preparing conference talks, writing articles or contributing to open source.
By doing all of this not only I’m able to express my “thanks for everything” for other software developers but also learn about your day-to-day struggles related to gathering the knowledge, avoiding distractions and just becoming more competent. This never-ending learning journey is something that affects all of us — interns, junior developers, but also people who can be easily called experts. Why? Because to be able to learn and grow we constantly need to look for valuable resources that work as leverage for us. We need posts, articles, courses, and videos that not only come from the industry we work in, not only cover the topics of the same technologies we’re using to build our projects but also match or exceed our experience and seniority level.
Gathering valuable knowledge in such dynamic environment like ours can be achieved through various ways, but one of the most popular is probably through knowledge aggregators. We use Twitter to follow experts which helps us learn new things. We use Reddit to subscribe to the newest and the most exciting content from a given branch of software development. Sometimes we even use YouTube to watch others teaching us the craft. All of that works fine but at the same time, you can’t say it was built keeping developers in mind. As a result, we’re facing tons of unrelated posts, news and “must sees” which distract us from gathering the knowledge. Besides software development, there are suggestions that help us procrastinate instead of focus on a given subject. I strongly believe we can do better.
Today I’d like to show you Learney (https://learney.io) — my take on the topic of knowledge aggregators focused on the needs of software developers.
For developers eager to learn and grow
There are at least two aspects of Learney you may find useful — the first one is related to people eager to learn new things, and the second one is related to creators and teachers. Let me briefly describe both perspectives.
The first perspective is related to the needs of developers who want to grow and constantly expand their skillset. In Learney, people like you and me can easily pick the paths they want to follow to get the most valuable knowledge, but what’s even more important — we can finally avoid all that irrelevant noise. By noise, I mean topics which are either too advanced or too basic topics at a given point in our career. Each resource you post (a blog post, an article, a video) contains corresponding seniority level that can be also suggested by others. In Learney senior developers can filter out “how to hello world” stories, while junior developers can gradually pick more and more advanced topics.
Additionally, thanks to Discover page, you’re able to widen your worldview and discover all the things outside of your areas of interest — new languages, new frameworks and new methodologies. This feature is still pretty young, but in the future I’d like to introduce even more exciting features that will work as an automatic learning assistant showing you relevant opportunities to develop your skills, suggesting new topics and making sure that you’re moving forward.
For content creators looking for the audience
The second perspective I’d like to talk about is the perspective of content creators. First and foremost, you should get interested in Learney because it’s yet another knowledge aggregator which can help you reach even more people with the content you produce. Knowing the fact that the whole platform is built for developers the engagement around your posts, articles and videos might very likely grow. Also, the timing is important. Since we’re in the early days of this project everything you post will reach people who love experiment with novelties and who are looking new authors to follow. Secondly, I bet that as a content creator you’re spending long hours thinking about target audiences. In Learney it’s easier to find the right people since every submission gets rated by the community in the context of the required experience and seniority level. You’ll find a more detailed explanation about this in incoming posts.
So that’s a brief description of Learney from two perspectives. Firstly, it’s a knowledge aggregator for developers that help you find the knowledge matching your experience and interests. Secondly, every content creator posting their work on Learney gains yet another way of reaching people interested in learning, developing their skills and growing even further, which may help you to build bigger engagement around your blogs, YouTube channels or portfolios.
What’s next for this project?
Today it’s too early to promise that Learney will radically improve your approach to learning and gathering the knowledge. For sure I’ll do my best for this to happen, but first few weeks of this project are dedicated to inviting more people to this community, asking for feedback and iterating over the assumptions from the beginning. If you spent five minutes of your precious time reading this I want to say thank you, and at the same time, I want to invite you to try Learney because I believe that it should be much easier for developers to find the valuable knowledge.
See you next time!
Originally posted at https://blog.learney.io
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