Why You Should Invest In Yourself?

If you like stories, then this is for you, and more than that you are the part of this story and every developer or person who is part of Software Development.

I will be speaking at Ng Srilanka this year, if you are planning to come to the conference please give a shout and don't be hesitated to say Hi!

Short Stories:

During my college days I never learned anything apart from the basics of programming, I always thought whatever little knowledge I have would be sufficient to get the job, as I will have the CS degree. I was wrong, once I started looking for the job, got the reality check. What I missed, rather than investing my time learning to code I wasted my time, not investing that time for learning to code, it takes 1 hour a day that is more than enough.
When I started my first job, I was lucky that I had the job during the recession of 2008. I had no actual project, I had a lot of time, but again I wasted my time thinking I will learn when I have the project.
Soon I decided to quit my job within a year, was at home for a month and did one job on contract for 4 months, again I wasted a lot of time doing the irrelevant thing which was not at all helpful for my career.
In 2010 finally, I had actual dev job where I got the opportunity to write some code for the windows application which I think I did ok, My manager thought I did great, so the user of the application. But today I realize I never gave my 100 %, I never cared to learn how it can be done in the better way or what is the best solution because never invested my time learning how it can be done in the best way.
In 2011 started working in a startup, there I realized I am doing something wrong, and started investing my time learning new things, learned .Net MVC, Web API and a lot of SQL Server.

Short stories from Startup

The advantage of working in a small organization is you know almost everyone and more people you meet more stories you have. So I had a lot of fun working with people from a different mindset.

We were working on .Net MVC back in 2012 and were trying to rewrite an app which was written in ASP.Net, we used to learn and implement as we had 6 months deadline I was pumped up so my another friend Imran, as both of us used to work in Windows App and never spoke to each other for almost 4 months, which is quite an interesting story (maybe I will write it in my next post), we used to learn and implement and few of our teammates just used to copy the code which we wrote, invest your time learning rather than copy-pasting.
Whenever you write your code using new tech stack remember there are optimized way you can write it, and if someone asks you to do it, invest your time learning how it can be done, rather than thinking I am writing same code from last 4 years, if you think that, dude you are into the wrong profession.
Don't be in office for more than 8 hours daily and don't make habit of working over weekends, until you have some production issue, invest your time into learning things apart from your work, Yes I did worked crazy hours, never NEVER do that, work for yourself, time is really precious, don't invest it for someone else, invest for yourself.

Life After Startup

I would not lie, I enjoyed my time with the startup and still cherish those 5 years as I made a lot of friends and of course a lot of stories to learn from.

Once I left that job, I used to think I know everything but realized I was too busy working on .NET that I missed learning about new stacks, invest your time to learn about, which stack is being used in technology. Don't ever think you know everything, because

Some Learning From Conducting Interviews

I have been conducting interviews since 2013 and I had a really bad experience, and one of the common answer when I ask them "why they are not prepared" the answer was "My organization does not use this stack or technology." Please give some time to yourself rather than doing blaming your organization.

Best Time For Developers and New Learners

If you want to be a developer, the time is perfect, most of the learning resources are freely available.

Azure provides free 12 months with many free services and credits
GCP provides 12 months free access to all service.
AWS provides free tier plan.

Apart from access to services, they also provide learning resources for free.

Thanks to the Open Source Community, there are many blog posts and free learning resources are available.

Final Advice To Developers

Start from today, forget about the past you can not change past, but can make your future perfect. Learn from your mistakes, programming is an art, and in the case to master it, you need to practice and improvise yourself.

Start attending Meetups and Conferences, purchase books and courses invest in learning. I have decided to invest my 5% of salary towards learning new things.