So I can recall something that Jeff Atwood said a few years ago about “The Magpie Developer” and it stuck with me. And I’ve heard Robert Martin (aka “Uncle Bob”) discuss “The Churn” which seems to be his feeling of magpie developers constantly seeking shiny new toys. Recently I also spotted this excellent write up on the idea of “Diseases of the Will” on BrainPickings. Seems like the type of person he describes as the “bibliophile” or “polyglot” could describe a lot of software developers.

But I don’t think it’s quite as simple or clear-cut as many of us would like it to be. Saying “Well I know <TechnologyX> and therefore I’m going to stick with it because it’s just a tool and any tool can do any job” is not only foolish, it’s counter productive. It’s somewhat analogous to saying “Well I’ve learned to use a wrench and so, therefore, I’m going to use this wrench for every mechanical job I need to do everywhere!” You can drive a nail with a wrench but a hammer makes it a lot easier. So it seems that we need to at least be aware of new ideas in software development even if we decide our best bet is to stick with the technologies we already know.

So how do we balance the need to learn new things against the constraints of our limited time? That’s what I want to address here. I don’t know that I have any answers but I certainly have some suggestions.

Learning How To Learn

One thing that has been impressed upon me again and again is that many of us, i. e. software developers, don’t know the best ways to learn a new subject. For one thing, for a lot of us a lot of technical topics came somewhat easily up to a point. For myself I thought I was pretty good at math until I hit integral calculus. I really struggled with integral calculus. Partly I wasn’t terribly motivated to learn it at the time and partly I really didn’t have any study habits to speak of because I’d never really needed them. As I am sure people reading this essay will understand it’s probably one of the worst feelings I’ve ever felt to be unable to understand math immediately. If I had developed some sort of study habits I wouldn’t have been so badly thrown. If I had a bit less pride and admitted to myself that I could stand with some tutoring, I wouldn’t have been so badly thrown.

My point is that lifelong learning is an essential part of being a software developer so it’s worth your time to invest a bit in discovering good study habits if you don’t already possess them.

Making Time For Learning

Another essential ingredient of acquiring new skills is setting aside time to do it. I am fortunate enough to work for a company that sets a great deal of importance in training its employees. They expect all of us to set aside 5 hours a month solely for learning. Not every company is that enlightened.

Of course the time for learning has to be balanced with time for other things. More importantly, time for learning can become an excuse for avoiding things we don’t want to do so it does make sense to set a time limit on your learning and try your best to stick to that time budget.

What Should I Learn

This is, to me, one of the essential questions that a technologist must ask herself or himself. Given we only have limited time to acquire new skills and given that we don’t want to waste that most precious commodity, time, what should we focus ourselves on?

One answer I’ve heard trotted out repeatedly is to chase the next big trend. Right now the next big trend seems to be machine learning and artificial intelligence. I’m tempted to put those two terms in quotes because I think they are among some of the worst names for an idea since someone decided to call our genetic material colored bodies (chromosomes). But I digress.

My answer to the question “what should I learn?” is–learn whatever interests you. There will always be some shiny new technology to chase so don’t spend your life trying to learn the latest fad. In that I do believe that I do agree with Uncle Bob.

But even if I say learn whatever interests you, I can improve that recommendation a bit more. Learn something that interests you that is fundamentally stretching your mind. Are you the best C# developer at your company? Learn F#. Functional programming is a pretty dramatic paradigm shift from OO. They are not orthogonal to each other (as everyone seems to think they are) but rather they complement each other in nice ways. Of course if you’re really very interested in learning another OO language, that’s fine too. But I think it’s safe to say that one grows himself or herself more through fundamentally different approaches than through learning new variations on the same theme.