From the course: Developer Career Paths and Certifications

What should your education plan include?

From the course: Developer Career Paths and Certifications

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What should your education plan include?

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- When I was in high school soccer, our water fountain was next to our room where I could hear strange noises through the windows. When I asked one of my friends, what was in that room, he told me that it was the computer lab. And the only way to get in there was to take a computer programming class. So of course I signed up right away. Now that's the moment my developer journey began. Everyone gets started like me by making a commitment to education. And I don't mean formal degrees. Because developer tools change often, you'll have to plan to constantly learn new things. 90% of all developers say that they have taught themselves a your language, framework or tool outside their formal education. And at least 60% have taken a course online, about 40% of them contribute to open source software. The first thing in your education plan is to make sure that you focus on a continuous education strategy. As a developer, your education will start at some point, but it should never finish. Make sure you leave time every week for learning something new. Now, one technique you can try is to add learning into every project. Try to learn at least 10 to 15% of something new with every project you're working on. Also really important is getting good at solving problems. And I get a lot of questions about which frameworks or languages to study. And what you learn at school is out of date as soon as you finish any program. Problem solving is more important than learning specific frameworks. Here's the topics that you should look for when planning out your education. First is algorithms, which show you how to solve specific data problems. You should also get good at a core language that's most important in your field. That's JavaScript for example, if you're a web developer. Now make sure you study database languages like SQL, and NOSQL. And that you have a solid amount of experience working with them. One thing that is often overlooked is learning to work with other developers. So courses on good or agile software development are fantastic. You should be comfortable working with APIs, application programming interfaces that let you communicate with other services. Contributing to open source can give you a practical experience working with others, and solving real problems. Plus, it's a great way to show that you're giving back to the community. The truth is that frameworks, languages and tools you'll learn are less important than what you can do with them. You learn more important things about programming by solving real problems.

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