During introspections, we often ask ourselves the following questions: What new things have I tried, what changes have I made, and what have I achieved?

In recent years, more and more topics related to “independent learning” and “amateur promotion” have appeared.

We often receive questions from some students: programmers are very busy. How can they use their fragmented time to study or do things they are interested in in their busy work? Whether it is new graduates, or two or three years of workplace people, and even the elderly working for many years are concerned about this problem. How can today’s programmers use their spare time to achieve a satisfactory state of being?

Today, we invited 4 engineers of tao department of technology, to share some of their amateur promotion skills, as well as the schedule, I hope to provide you with a reference.

01 Tao System technology – come and go

It’s a very realistic topic, and my approach is to find out where my time is outside of work.

A programmer’s day is actually quite busy, and the time that can be set aside each day can be divided into several pieces:

Commuting time

My commute is the subway, and I spend about 40 minutes on the subway every day. During this time, I usually read books, which adds up to 2-3 books a year.

Some people may not love reading, in fact, different types of books are really poor appeal, find their own interest in the book to cultivate the habit of reading.

When I was an undergraduate, I was also more interested in playing games than reading books. When I was a graduate student, I happened to read the Count of Monte Cristo, and I began to love reading. Many of the stories in the book don’t make for a TV show or a movie, but these are interesting stories that allow me to have more fun outside of code. After that, I slowly began to look for books, read what my friends shared in the circle of friends, and communicate with my colleagues about the good books I read.

Some time ago, it was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Some of my colleagues, Yi ‘an and Zeng Qun, were very interested in the Selected Works of MAO Zedong. I also learned a lot from reading the Biography of MAO Zedong published by the Literature Research Office of the CPC Central Committee.

Lunch break

This period of time is not very long, after eating about half an hour, used to nap students can take the opportunity to rest, for the afternoon work to raise enough spirit.

Personally, I’m more used to walking around with my colleagues and catching up on the latest life news.

In the evening after work

Exercise two to three days a week. Run and jump rope outside, or follow keep at home.

No good body, mood is not good, other are not good, so to their health or to pay more attention to some.

IT practitioners sit for too long during the day and use their eyes for too long. Try not to play with mobile phones for too long at night.

Fitness is to recharge the body, and reading is to recharge the mind. In some more fragmented time, I will check the technology columns related to ARTIFICIAL intelligence on Zhihu and wechat public accounts to see the industry trends.

Over the weekend

Eat, drink, play, keep reading, work out and write.

Reading is passively receiving information. Another small goal of mine is to write my own articles and try to make a personal technical impact.

Set a small target last year, wechat public account concern more than 500 (more than 500 can add advertising, earn traffic share, haha). Wrote a few, only attracted the attention of their circle of friends, analysis of the reasons: first, the content is not exciting enough, the second is that the wechat public account has no public domain recommendation mechanism. After analyzing the sources of fans, it is found that most of them are from one or two high-quality answers. The head effect is very serious. Therefore, it is necessary to write a high-quality article again, and try to get one of my own 10W + as soon as possible.

02 Tao System technology – Jiu Wu

In fact, there are no secrets and tricks to improve their own, as long as willing to spend spare time to learn, plus a long time to adhere to, you can become a great god.

reading

Personally, I like reading, like to read paper books, remember just began to work, a lot of things all can’t, can only write CSS page, is a real figure, at the same time, and especially want to be a great god, and then every day at noon meal an hour of reading in a cubicle, will stay in the company after work go home two hours of reading, In this way, reading books and writing Demo every noon and evening, the improvement rate in the early stage was very obvious, and I could feel that I had learned new knowledge almost every day.

I recommend reading more technical books, especially paper books. Students who are familiar with me know that I have a lot of books. A book will go through many steps from filling in the selection list to the final publication. The professional editors of the publishing house will also check and revise it repeatedly with the author for many times. After it is published, the content quality of such a book is very guaranteed. As a rule of thumb, the quality of his books was very high.

Learning materials

Learning materials are very important, and it’s important to read high quality first hand materials. A lot of times when we learn a technology and we can’t understand it, it’s not necessarily that we’re stupid. It’s also possible that there’s something wrong with the materials.

I’ve seen so many articles about a technology that EVEN if I know the technology beforehand, I really don’t understand what they’re saying. I’ve seen a lot of articles where maybe the author didn’t know much about the technology, he just put together some other articles.

Poor learning materials are often obscure and don’t explain the technology clearly, while high quality learning materials usually explain a technology clearly and accurately, so it’s not too complicated or boring to learn.

JS framework, library, tools, etc., I usually learn from the official website and well-praised paper books. I usually learn the basics by reading good quality paper books + reading W3C specifications. Web performance is an area I usually learn about on the Chrome Developer website and in the web.dev article.

After having certain basic knowledge, you can judge the quality of learning materials. At this time, you can pay attention to some public accounts or star programmers to acquire some knowledge.

Writing to share

In addition to learning, I also use my spare time to write articles, do technology sharing, etc., to share the knowledge I have learned. It is my personal experience that sharing the knowledge I have learned is of great help to my growth. Sometimes IN the process of writing articles, I will find that I have not really learned a certain knowledge thoroughly.

What’s more, writing and sharing can help you learn to think and exercise your thinking ability, which is actually very important.

Adhere to the

In the end, persistence is the most important. In fact, our career is a long distance race without end. Many of us may want to ask how we can run faster and win the race.

It doesn’t make any sense to be faster in the short term on this never-ending track.

Most people give up in the middle of the race, which is why there are so few bulls. The only thing that can decide whether this game is won or lost is the word “hold on.”

It’s not the fast runners who win on this track, it’s the few who keep running.

They’re only winning because they’re still running.

Books recommended

Finally, I recommend a list of books, all of which I have read and feel very good.

Javascript-related books: “What you Don’t Know about JavaScript”, “Understanding ES6”, “advanced Programming in JavaScript”

CSS related books: “CSS World” (this kind of book I did not read, but I read Zhang Xinxu blog to learn CSS, although I did not read the book he published, but with the author’s trust, and the author also specifically for this book to do a website feeling is pretty hard, the quality should be guaranteed)

JS framework related books: React related books: I have not read it, I do not recommend, Vue related recommendation one: “Easy to read Vue. JS” (non-advertising, content quality and depth is indeed the best on the market at present).

Node.js related books: “Node.js in A Nutshell” (I have only read one of them written by Park Ling, whose quality is ok, but I haven’t read the others, so I only recommend this one).

Here are some other good books I’ve read: Algorithm 4, Web performance authoritative guide “(the author is former chairman W3C working group on performance, the translator is song-feng li teacher, although the book was published nearly 10 years, but I feel is worth a look),” refactoring “and” code farmers turn “, “the path to clean code”, “soft skills – code of survival guide”, “the pyramid principle”.

Tao System technology – Yuexi

It’s a very realistic topic, and my approach is to find out where is my time outside of work? A programmer’s day is actually quite busy, and the time that can be set aside each day can be divided into several pieces

How do you allocate your spare time and how do you stay productive?

  1. First of all, we should live a regular life, go to bed early and get up early, for example, try to force the point to sleep at night, stay up late at night must bring the malaise during the day.
  2. Maintain exercise, regular fitness running, relieve the fatigue of work, but also to work into more physical capital, a shout from the gym, work fatigue swept away.
  3. In your spare time, you should slow down and savor your life. For example, if you are interested in the history of a certain period, you might as well make a systematic study and then make a long-term business learning plan based on the knowledge you have learned. In short, you should do something that enables you to focus on and give more pleasure to your life.

Does multithreading at work really improve productivity?

Sometimes feel a lot of things, immersed in busy after easy to switch back and forth in many things, the final result is often a thing is not done; Ordinary people are really not suitable for multi-threaded work, sometimes might as well think more, to think, appropriate slow down, distinguish priorities, and then focus on one by one to complete, often the effect will be better;

In work, we often encounter new fields and new problems. How to learn new technologies and get started quickly?

In the face of difficulties in work, I usually read experience posts, find a good book or materials, and set systematic learning goals in stages with the goal of solving problems. The phased goals can prevent the total goal from being lost.

04 Tao department technology – Yong Jian

The difference between “spare time” and “work” is that we can selectively improve our weak points.

So first of all, we must understand what we need to improve, in order to have a targeted to improve.

Personal understanding, as a technical personnel to improve the main direction is no more than technical foundation, communication skills, ability to promote, etc.

In spare time, the main thing that can be improved is the technical foundation, which is also better for targeted learning.

Self analysis

First of all, we need to have a copy of our own technology stack, which have mastered, which are not familiar with, which do not understand, and then we can study for their weaknesses. Of course, there are still some technologies that we do not know at all, which requires us to often pay attention to the industry dynamics. For these, we can attend some offline meetup as the case may be, and have face-to-face communication with the big guys.

Here’s my own personal technical map:

See through appearances to the essence

In the process of learning, we should pay attention to see the essence through the phenomenon, often said What, How, Why in the process of learning to often think.

Don’t put limits on yourself

To sum up, it is not to set limits, try to find their own breakthrough point, in the boundaries of their own technology, rather than constantly to do some repeated things.

As for the way to improve that there are a lot of, first hand technical information must be a variety of official websites, for a variety of middleware learning, look at the source code is the best way (Github); If you want to learn more systematically, you can read some books and professional papers, which are good means. There are also communities where you can learn with others, exchange ideas and learn from each other.

Avoid direct online search to learn, in addition to how much you see does not mean how much, put into practice and produce results is our ultimate goal.

conclusion

As mentioned above, no matter what the profession, we need to continue to improve. There are also many people who feel that not only are their lives stagnant, but their jobs are not moving forward. In fact, there is no more than one reason: too much thinking, too little doing.

The solution is simple. Just do it.