New tools learned

(upbeat music) - Besides learning the things you need to know to do your job, learn other things that have to do with your job but maybe aren't directly related. For example, there's a big controversy people keep talking about. Should designers know how to code and should developers know how to design? And you know, you can go on either side of that but really the bottom line is, 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 gonna 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 can do. - So even if you're an experienced developer, I feel like it's super important to keep building those skills. And I know everyone says that and it's almost a truism at this point in programing. But for instance, for me you know, I started out coding HTML when HTML was the only game in town. Now I had stepped away for a couple years from coding and when I came back all of a sudden there's this thing called CSS. And so, the language had totally changed. All those attributes were deprecated, were no longer used. So the language, especially in front-end development is changing all the time. It's improving all the time. And it's really kind of come into its own. Front-end development I feel like as a programing discipline in just very recent years. - Right now I was learning, recently I was learning Java Spring and Java 8 features. So the latest features of Java that have come out have enabled Java to be as powerful as node and (mumbles), and it added a lot of features in Java that were previously lacking. So for me, since I started off coding with Java and now I'm still sticking to Java and the language is also evolving as I'm learning, that's very exciting for me. - So one of the things I'm excited about personally in software development as a tester is learning how to use monitoring tools, so Commodity, AWS, some of these tools to be able to drive insights into testing. So as a tester we often think about, okay what does a customer want? What does a customer want in this situation? How does this work? What are they gonna think about it? And with monitoring tools we can actually get some insight, we can get some data there. We can analyze that data. We can figure out what do they actually do? How do they actually use these things? So I'm excited about those kind of tools and how they can be leveraged to help us produce quality software. How they can be leveraged to drive testing insights into figuring out how things work. - I'm currently taking a look at containers. I know they're a big buzz word and certainly not a silver bullet. But I think that they're a very fast growing and widely being adopted for building applications. And so, I'm really trying to figure out what kind of applications are they gonna be best for? That kind of higher level piece as well as they mechanics of, all right, how do I go in and build a container? How do I use Kubernetes to orchestrate a whole bunch of these things so they can talk to each other and I can deploy them all together? - I've been learning and been really excited about Amazon's Lambda. The whole server less movement that functions as a service. And I've been excited about (mumbles) over at Signal Sciences. So I've been excited that they released kind of the Lambda for go. That's been really cool. So kind of in my spare time I've been picking that up and working on some side projects for that. - Being able to have a good understanding of the foundation is always my advice. Because once you have the foundation it's much easier to learn the tools that are built on top of it. And at the end of the day, sometimes you've just got to pick one and just learn it. Because once you learn one you'll be able to learn the other one a little bit better. So, having a general knowledge of what each thing does, understanding what it's built on, and just picking one and learning it. (upbeat music)