Acquire new skills

- I've made a career as a developer now for seven years, almost entirely self-taught, but I was able to learn those skills just by teaching them to myself and reading and applying myself and then continuing to use them for years afterward. - In terms of projects, one of the most important things that you can do in this job is learn to challenge yourself by doing realistic things. I always try to say, well, what would happen if I do this and I know JS server, and what happens is I push myself to learn and then you sort of find out that that other way of doing things is actually better. - But I find the way that we have the breadth of information available to us now, I think it really now just becomes a desire, like do I want to learn this new thing? It seems like a lot of people in our field kind of have that same desire. - So in my career, I feel like I've reinvented myself a number of times. I started out editing books, I've been a developer, I've done a number of other different roles and I feel like for me part of that has been about being open to trying new things, just cultivating an attitude that this is something I can do, or this is something I'd like to try. - A person who knows more things is always going to be more valuable than a person who knows less things. So by adding on different knowledge, whether it's directly or indirectly related to what you do, that's going to make you a more valuable employee when it comes time for raises or promotions or looking for a new job and it will give you a lot more choices in the type of work you do. - All that learning is going to pay off and continue to make you a better developer. And it's also going to make you more efficient the next time you do something. - And sometimes it's hard to know what it is that you need to learn, because web development has changed so much that there's so many different tools that almost do the same thing as well. And so it can be overwhelming trying to figure out which thing am I supposed to learn first. - The goal is to selectively choose the things that are really, really important to you and then move those over. And some of them you'll discover will be great and some of them you'll discover, yeah, that was kind of a waste of time, but that's okay because now there's a whole category of some other things related to that, that you can also probably safely put to the side. - So what today's developers are doing is the whole thing is all full stack, you got to be full stack. I'm here to tell you, you don't, you don't have to be full stack. It's okay to be a specialist in one particular area, but you really need to stay up with that one particular area. Don't feel like you have to scattershot and go into a whole bunch of different areas to try to learn way more than you actually need to do. Focus on something that really lights your fire and then just do it every day. - You will never stop learning here, so embrace that. And then I think you will be happy, I think it's an interesting field to work on.