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Nice article. One thing I'm noticing is that I have less and less time to learn and explore. Between the work projects, the open-source projects of my spare t

Nice article. One thing I'm noticing is that I have less and less time to learn and explore. Between the work projects, the open-source projects of my spare time, family life and the entertainment I need to keep some sanity, I can't seem to find the time or the focus necessary for expanding my knowledge. I still do a lot of learning, but as I suspect that most of you are doing, the learning I'm doing is only incremental and in small dozes. This means that I end up rejecting solutions that invalidate my prior knowledge, because those require a leap of faith and resources that I don't have. Maybe this is what growing old feels like — experience and responsibilities ends up getting in the way of learning. I do feel the need to become foolish again.

criddell 9y ago
Time is fixed and the things we want to learn is expanding. I'm not sure how to deal with that. For me, there's a real tension between breadth and depth and finding the sweet spot between the two is hard.
- ericmcer 9y ago
  This perfectly describes my learning dilemma. If you have a niche job like in the article (visual studio extensions) your skill-set may be narrow enough to easily expand upon and gain depth in a new area. If you are a full stack developer at a small company the breadth of stuff you need to know and learn is such that it seems impossible to master new things.
ssivark 9y ago
On this note, I highly recommend Edward Kmett's talk -- Stop treading water: Learning to learn Talk slides: http://yowconference.com.au/slides/yow2014/Kmett-StopTreadingWater.pdf http://yowconference.com.au/slides/yow2014/Kmett-StopTreadin... This is the only link I can find to the video, which unfortunately seems inaccessible now: https://twitter.com/kmett/status/574920781790113793?lang=en https://twitter.com/kmett/status/574920781790113793?lang=en EDIT: I found this -- https://vid.me/vJvm/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by-edward https://vid.me/vJvm/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by... It would be great if someone could link to the video.

criddell 9y ago

Time is fixed and the things we want to learn is expanding. I'm not sure how to deal with that. For me, there's a real tension between breadth and depth and finding the sweet spot between the two is hard.

ericmcer 9y ago
This perfectly describes my learning dilemma. If you have a niche job like in the article (visual studio extensions) your skill-set may be narrow enough to easily expand upon and gain depth in a new area. If you are a full stack developer at a small company the breadth of stuff you need to know and learn is such that it seems impossible to master new things.

ssivark 9y ago

On this note, I highly recommend Edward Kmett's talk -- Stop treading water: Learning to learn Talk slides: http://yowconference.com.au/slides/yow2014/Kmett-StopTreadingWater.pdf http://yowconference.com.au/slides/yow2014/Kmett-StopTreadin... This is the only link I can find to the video, which unfortunately seems inaccessible now: https://twitter.com/kmett/status/574920781790113793?lang=en https://twitter.com/kmett/status/574920781790113793?lang=en EDIT: I found this -- https://vid.me/vJvm/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by-edward https://vid.me/vJvm/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by... It would be great if someone could link to the video.