Self-development of a developer — thoughts + my list of sites and resources that I use(d)

4 min readJan 28, 2018

I’ve been a professional developer for a couple of years. During my career I had an opportunity to work and collaborate with different kinds of people. There were passionate ones who felt a deep desire for self-improvement and those who were rather lazy, didn’t want to improve their skillset and felt comfortable (or just didn’t know how to move forward) sitting for years in the same project knowing all ins and outs of it.

Looking back at their careers, as you probably can figure out, those who were ambitious and kept learning even after their regular working hours and felt the need for self-improvement, have become great specialists in the field, with
a great salary and range of opportunities. Such people are definitely the role models that you want to follow. IT is a very fast changing environment and keeping up with the latest trends and technologies costs a lot of effort and time. If you want to be a top tier specialist — you need to do something more than regular people do. You need to dedicate a fair amount of time for learning new things and strengthen the knowledge that you already possess.

The other side of the coin — developers who “just” do their job, expecting nothing more from their careers, feel comfortable in one project/company for years and don’t feel the need to learn new things or improve their current
skillset. They just don’t give a damn. They do they work fine, can pay their bills and live quite a happy and comfortable life. What’s wrong with this approach? If they feel really happy about the current situation — that’s O.K.
People are different, have different perceptions of happiness, goals and ambitiousness. If they really feel O.K. with the current situation — nothing wrong about it from a life perspective.

But such cases are rather scarce. Developers are not dumb. They read news, follow trends (but not necessary adopt them) and know that new technologies appear at a tremendous pace and frameworks/tools they work with are outdated. Moreover, they probably work with more experienced and better skilled colleagues and see how they can write code, what they know
and what they are capable of. This can lead to a lot of frustration and instead of igniting a positive stimulus for self-improvement, they just feel more miserable and less comfortable with their skills. This can lead to a drop of
productivity and motivation. To make matters worse, there is a possibility that a developer who doesn’t improve his skillset regularly, will have a very hard way to get a new job if something will go wrong in the current one. Lots of
stress to deal with.

The reasons why some of us keep improving themselves while others stay in the same place for years is a great topic for a new post so I will just encourage you to write some comments on situations from your life about what I wrote
above. Are you a developer who sees a constant, positive change in his career or rather you feel that your career is in the same place as it was a couple of years before? You will surely find lots of examples of two kinds of people I defined and let’s remember that things are almost never black and white (e.g.: people who don’t learn anything new at all).

Start improving your skillset with small steps. The first step I recommend is to read blogs, tutorials and articles.I won’t believe that you can’t sacrifice some amount of time (like even 15–20 minutes for a start) per day to do this.
Below is a categorized list of Front-end sites that I use more or less regularly as well as some resources on specific topics. Feel free to provide some sites that you find useful in the comments.