Honest question for the folks out there with a career-level title in software engineering: how do you make goals or plan what to learn, aside from immediate demands from your employer?
I don’t believe everyone has to program outside of work as a hobby, nor should everyone constantly “show growth” — that’s unsustainable. And I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions or annual goals (that often end up too inflexible for reality), but it is that season and so I am thinking about it.
If you don’t already have immediate needs or projects to work on, what tells you to spend more time learning something? How do you decide what to use as far as programming languages, practices, patterns, tools, etc? I’ve got some of my own answers but I’m playing it close to the chest here just to learn more about how others decide these things.
@mathias my 2 ₹
I just read articles, blogs (and Mastodon timelines!) ... almost exclusively. I have stumbled into and rejected several tangents as not leading to enough learning, and have ended up only looking at tools that complement work tech rather than "fix" work tech. Its just a little bit of #Prolog so far, with #TLAplus and #Erlang on the list next.
I think getting into the #RIIR sort of mentality doesn't help me at all. There is a lot to improve on "inside the box".
