Be curious. Read and watch a bunch of different things to get other perspectives on tech. I find this to be a really great way to learn new things and have talking points with other developers. As an example, I often have this exact scenario with my colleague Ed.
I was reading this blog post on the weekend and I found this topic on
insert techto be quite interesting
I like learning about the new trend and seeing why other developers like it. It might not even be a trend necessarily, it might be something quite old that I just never knew about.
These are some of the resources that I use to be up to date on developer related news or find new techniques to use in my own projects.
Excellent podcast on the latest developments in JavaScript.
Awesome YouTuber that does some great tutorials and live coding. He does mainly focus on JavaScript but has tutorials on a bunch of different topics like vim or technical interviews.
The best developer forum on the web. I've learnt a lot from reading the most popular articles each week. Even if a lot of the content is far too technical or domain specific I still can pick up bits and pieces.
In terms of projects that I like to work on I often think about the services I currently use and ask myself
Can I can do better?
An example of that recently is the Footy Tips website that my friends use. I think I can do better that this. I think I can make a nicer UI and add some extra features on top of the way the website currently works.
I also often start simple. Maybe I can make a simple terminal app as a proof of concept and then turn it into something bigger. For the Footy Tips idea I found an API that gives me the AFL schedule and results. To test out the proof of concept I made a ruby terminal app that fetches all of the data and then sorts it correctly.
require 'faraday'
require 'json'
require 'date'
url = "https://api.squiggle.com.au/?q=games&year=2021"
games = JSON.parse(Faraday.get(url).body)["games"]
sorted_games = games.sort_by do |game|
Date.parse(game["date"])
end
pp sorted_games
You then need to talk to people about your idea. Ed gave me some great advice today on how I could use Heroku Schedular to ensure that my results data is updated at least once per day after all the matches have been played. With that updated data I could then see if people have correctly tipped the right team.
This kind of cycle is what you need to do over and over again to stay interested in the craft of coding and building things.