This morning I heard an interview with Nathan Barry on the Living for Monday podcast. One bit from the interview that really resonated with me, was when Nathan shared how he acquired the skills that he has today in software design.
Nathan’s entry into web design started from a book he borrowed from the library, but soon he realized what he read was irrelevant because of the pace in which web technologies and design techniques advance. So he turned to the internet to read blogs by experts in his field. He then followed their tutorials or lessons and applied what he learned immediately. More or less this is how I have come to acquire most of the knowledge that I use in my day to day life as a software developer.
I learned a lot of my front-end development from sites like nettuts+, css-tricks and simply reading other people’s code and then applying it to my own projects. Recently I’ve been teaching myself back-end development with Ruby and it’s been a blast! But again I wouldn’t be where I am today without the wealth of professionals who have openly shared their knowledge on the internet.
All this comes back to the reason behind this blog post. I’ve come to realize that I, myself to some degree am an expert. I’d like to emphasize, “to some degree” because I know I only possess a minuscule amount of knowledge in a lot of different areas. But like Nathan pointed out in the interview, if it wasn’t for those experts who openly and transparently shared their knowledge, I wouldn’t know half the things I know today.
In light of this I want to embark on a quest to start sharing my own experiences and knowledge in hope that it would help someone else out that is on their journey to learn software development.
