I always wanted to have a Brighton Java talk on lifelong learning. The techniques, tools and fashions in software development are constantly changing – how do you keep on top of this churn while doing an often-stressful job and maintaining the family and social life you have a right to? I never found anyone to give this talk, and now I don’t need to, as a fantastic talk by Trisha Gee called Becoming a Fully Buzzword Compliant Developer has been released on InfoQ.
In the talk, Gee sets out a simple step-by-step approach to learning and career development, without ignoring how expectations around this impact on often-excluded groups in IT. (Remember: asking for interview candidate’s github profile makes a lot of assumptions about your potential employees and their free time).
Gee also looks at how quickly new ideas are absorbed into the mainstream of development; how to discover and assess new buzzwords; the importance of real-world meetups (like Brighton Java!); and the importance of “Enough knowledge to blag your way through a conversation in the pub.”
Sometimes, when discussing training and development outside work, developers point out that there is no requirement for, say, HR staff or office managers to do their job as part of a hobby. But look at it another way: modern careers are a half-century or so. You want to find a way to engage with software development and lifelong learning that is so exciting that you want to do it. Even maintaining the simplest hobby site can help you to keep up with the latest exciting new things.
There is also a flip-side to Gee’s talk which is less often discussed – and that’s how little learning Java enterprise developers can get away with by using the slow pace of change to avoid any self-development. Mobile and JS devs tend to engage much more because their careers depend on it (an Android dev who does not use the latest APIs will soon be unemployable). New ideas and tools can take a long time to filter through to the enterprise. The downside of this is that it can take even longer to get them right – TDD, agile and microservices suffer in enterprises due to the lack of an engaged, interested and playful attitude among devs and managers.