Do you even read bro? 5 advices on reading and staying up to date

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-even-lift A popular meme back in the days. Used as a condescending expression to question the legitimacy of someone’s expertise around a certain topic. Do you even lift bro?

In the last couple of interviews when we asked the candidates what they read to keep up to date with the latest tech, they had no straight answer. I was a bit saddened by that fact, so I decided to write this blog post about the struggles I experienced and how I managed to keep on reading, either books or tech blogs.

This is also an extended version of the answers to questions I got asked at an IT Job Fair at our local university: How do you maintain your professional skill? and How to land your first job in IT? Hopefully you will find the advice that follows useful.

Already tired of reading? No problem here's a tldr:

• Read a major introductory book
• Subscribe to at least one newsletter
• Re-read important chapters, articles or books
• Read a book to master the subject
• Find the time to read, change priorities

The start

To give you a bit of context, I am a software engineer with no formal college education in programming. Most of the things I know I read in books and articles, the rest I learned from online courses. I was interested in programming and went to a few public lectures and workshops and managed to publish two small Android apps. Soon I realised that without proper core knowledge and understanding of programming I would never get far. In my last year of college (in Linguistics) I was lucky enough and got an opportunity to go on a summer internship to University of Indiana, USA. My job as an intern involved a bit of programming as well since I was into Computational Linguistics. I decided to invest that summer into reading two core introductory books. The first one was a general Introduction to Programming Using Java and the other was about Android Programming. I did spend almost all afternoons reading them, but it really paid off. That was what really got me off the ground and enabled me to move forward into the field.

That brings us to advice number one, especially if you are a beginner:

Invest time in reading at least one major introductory book that covers the subject thoroughly

Up until that point I read tutorials, watched videos and was able to muster up an application or two. But after reading 1000+ pages that went deep into the matter I finally understood a lot of the things that prior to this I was just copy pasting with little understanding on how they worked. Again, reading them was not easy. I remember keeping my finger on the Abstract class chapter and each time the abstract class would be mentioned further in the book I would have to go back and reread the chapter as it was hard for me to grasp the concept in just one go. For me, those two books enabled me to switch my profession and to land a job as a programmer.

The journey

The road ahead was paved with HTML and CSS as I moved into Web Application development and the ever changing world of Frontend development. To stay ahead of the game you had to follow an extremely broad and somehow Greatly Divided field. Even if you are an UX engineer focused on design, HTML and CSS or a JavaScript engineer focused on programming, there are still a lot of topics to cover. This is where weekly digests helped a lot.
At the beginning I was only getting Android Weekly which got replaced with JavaScript Weekly. Soon after I've added Medium daily digest. But the daily digest was a bit too much and I switched it to a weekly digest as well. Later on I added Frontend Focus, and have kept those three for more than 7 years now.
Both JavaScript Weekly and Frontend Focus are structured in a similar way. You get a General Articles section to start with, followed by a Quick and Brief section outlining a couple of new things out here. After that three sections follow: Tutorials and Articles, Tools and Resources and the last one is Jobs. I read all of the headings as they alone are informative enough to learn if a new Node version is out or an LTS for a tool came to an end. Every now and then I open a job posting or two to see how the industry standard is changing in that regard, mostly checking out the perks and the salaries.
Each of the three serves a purpose; JavaScript Weekly is JavaScript oriented, including backend JS. Frontend Focus includes more articles about Design and UX/UI, and my Medium feed is focused on Angular. In the end I usually read just one or two articles from all three weekly digests. Of course there comes a period of time when I do less reading, my inbox gets cluttered, I skip the digest for a couple of weeks and just delete them.

You don't have to subscribe to three but

Subscribe to at least one weekly digest.

Newsletters don't require that much focus time as a book, so you can read them wherever. Drinking your morning coffee at the office or in the waiting room at the dentist. What helps a lot to stay loyal to your weekly digests is having Inbox Zero Policy. That way the digests don't get lost too quickly and it also drives you into reading them.

As for the books, in the first couple of years I've read two JavaScript books: Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja and Mastering Modular Javascript. The 500-pager on how to become a Ninja was useful, but how to build modular architecture with JavaScript is the one I really loved. It's a rather thin book, around 150 pages, mostly text with very little code examples. After reading this book I was like, wow, I'll have to read this book again. And so I did, a year or so after.

The main benefit of reading a good book again, particularly many years later, is that your added experience of life [work] enables you to understand what the author had in mind much more clearly. Stein

Even though it takes a bit more effort, re-reading a book or at least some parts of it is essential in better understanding the topic.

That would be my 3rd advice

Re-read a chapter, an article or a book
Often, reading it once is not enough, you will deepen your understanding with the second read.

Although my transition from the initial Java/Android developer to a Web App developer went kind of smooth, I always had a feeling I was missing something. One day a colleague ordered JavaScript the Definitive Guide and by mistake we got two copies. I was glad and I took the opportunity to finally read a JavaScript book that covers the language from A to Z. Even though years passed and I was far off into the field I thought it was not too late for me to go through the ins and outs of the language, through all the quirkiness JavaScript provides. Challenge yourself to read that core book, the one that digs deep into the matter and that will "take your understanding and mastery to the next level" (O’Reilly). This applies to senior developers as well, as we had senior developer candidates that, to our surprise, lacked the basic and fundamental JavaScript knowledge.

That would be my 4th advice:

Read a book to master the subject
It's never too late to strengthen your fundamental knowledge. Don't feel uncomfortable going back to basics.

The end

Don't get me wrong. I'm no bookworm and I don't have a long list of books I want to read. I'm also not a routine person so my reading habits often change. With fields such as IT that constantly change, learning is an endless story in a life lasting sprint. I still get my tech weekly digests, but as my career changed direction a bit I started reading management books, going once more through most of the steps I went when I started as a developer.

My 5th and final advice would be:

Find the time to read
Change your priorities, change your routine.

At Cognism, we are enabled and encouraged to improve and educate ourselves by reading and taking courses. My first try at better reading habits was booking reading slots during the work week in the calendar. But it was quite hard to come into the office, take a book out and start reading there. Once I'm in the office I enter the office mode. Usually one or two persons are already on Slack waiting for me, emails waiting to be replied to, meetings to attend etc. What I started doing at one point was instead of going directly to the office, I would spend 30-45 minutes in the building's coffee bar reading and would come into the office a bit later.
Finding time to read at home is hard as well. Especially with 3 small children running around. For a while I did manage to squeeze in a slot. Once we put our 3 children to bed, instead of turning on Netflix immediately, I would spend 30-40 minutes reading, and then we would proceed to the newest must-watch series. Does not seem much, but falls nicely into the daily routine.
In the end it is not about having time, we all have 24 hours in our day, but it's about the priorities and on how you want to spend your time.
Experiment with different times and see what suits you the most and try to stick with it. If you have any suggestions or want to share any of you struggles please do post them in the discussion below!

The race for excellence has no finish line. (a wise internet person)

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