How to discover that you don’t know what you don’t know?
Also known as: How to find things you should learn?
This article has a computer science bias, but can be extended through other fields.
Motivation
When I realized that “college won’t teach me everything I should know”, I decided to move on and look up what tech companies are working with. This research showed me that I should’ve started doing that earlier!
Therefore, I want to help students, specially computer science students, to understand what they are missing and show them how to discover things that they even don’t know that exists but they should be learning.
Join communities
Well, it’s the 21st century and we have The Awesome Internet! Find a community and join it. These are the main communities any developer should participate:
Okay, but… What should I do on those communities? Well, let’s see:
GitHub is the new Facebook (at least for developers)
GitHub is a powerful community that offers lots of ways to interact with developers, projects, companies around the world! These are the things you can do there:
- Follow cool developers. The best engineers from the top companies are at GitHub. Follow them.
- Take a look at the code they are writing.
- Understand the projects they are creating.
- Star good repositories.
- Open significant Issues.
- Watch repositories that you wanna understand
Stack Overflow: the most powerful forum!
Google has good answers, but how about asking directly to the source? That’s what Stack Overflow stands for. Millions of great developers around the world are answering (and asking) good questions about software development. Go into it:
- Try to answer a question about something you know.
- Ask anything you want. Don’t forget to be coherent.
Slack: very productive instant message tool
Many software and technologies you will be using have a Slack channel. Join them. It’s a good way to stay closer to others developers and share knowledge. Here’s a channel to start:
Twitter: share the essential
Twitter was made to share short information. Developers tweet their projects and thoughts. Follow them and follow their companies.
Read more (Wow, really?)
At college you already have a huge list of books. Are you reading at least them? Nice, then go further. Check this Startup Library.
Also read different stuff, like companies blogs:
- Facebook Engineering Blog
- Google Developers Blog
- Airbnb Engineering & Data Science
- The GitHub Blog: Engineering
- Uber Engineering Blog
- Instagram Engineering
- Entria
You should also try to read other developers code. They are challengers and full of new concepts.
Find a mentor
When surfing through a community or a good reading, you will discover a new world, full of new technologies and awesome people. Pick a few to follow and make contact.
Don’t be shy. There are lots of cool developers out there waiting to help. They just want you to be really interested in learning something.
I found one: Sibelius Seraphini. He is leading me through many new experiences. Thank you, Sibelius!
You can follow him at GitHub and Twitter.
Apply to jobs/internships (Wait, what?)
Don’t be afraid. You don’t have to be a ninja on something (at least for now). And you don’t have to be finishing college. If you’ve learned the fundamentals of computer science, then you are able to try an interview or a challenge offered by any job/internship.
My point at this topic is, try and fail, then try again, fail again, but fail better.
Companies are expecting you to have some skills. Failing a job/internship interview/challenge will show you what skills you need to improve.
Take a look at this job offer and the skills they are expecting.
Build something with technologies you are learning
Put yourself to work! Start building something right now. Did I say now? Don’t worry if you “don’t know anything at all”. You’ll realize that doing is also a good way to learn.
Stuck? No problem! Ask for help. I’ve already showed you how to keep moving. GitHub, Stack Overflow, mentor… Learn different ways of doing the same thing.
Contribute to an open source project
Discovered a new library or framework? Is it open source? How about reading the source code and help the community of maintainers? Probably you’ll need to learn lots of new stuff.
You will also be promoting yourself as a developer. That’s awesome!
How about starting this Friday with Open Source Friday.
Always be motivated
Get passionate by the things you will be learning. This will help you to be happy when working.
And don’t stop coding. Turn ideas into real projects. You’ll realize that if you have something to do, you also have something to learn.
Thanks for reading
I hope this article was useful. Thanks for reading!
You can find me at GitHub and Twitter.
