How do you make progress?

[davezych]

In issue 690, in your last bullet point you made comments such as Keep asking questions of yourself and If you're not learning, you're treading water. What questions do you ask yourself and how do you learn things? Do you just dick around with languages/technologies/frameworks and build dumb shit or do you watch videos and read tutorials and read blog posts by smart people?

[holman]

/cc #690

What questions do you ask yourself and how do you learn things? Do you just dick around with languages/technologies/frameworks and build dumb shit or do you watch videos and read tutorials and read blog posts by smart people?

It's kind of binary for me — I think you kind of just know. At various points in my career I've realized, wow, I've certainly changed a lot in the last year, be it technically or organizationally or otherwise. I think that's a good realization. If you end up saying man, there's really nothing in the last year that I learned that was new or interesting, well then, you have a problem, imo. Certainly there are gradients — some years are more illuminating than others — but in my experience it's fairly stark.

If it doesn't seem super obvious to you, then you're probably doing alright.