Individual Project Learning Goal

[nelsonic]

Context 🌱

Since the beginning of @dwyl (the web/app development agency),
we've had a clear goal of sharing everything we know/learn with each other freely & openly.
see: https://github.com/dwyl/hq#individual-team-members

Which is why we have accumulated so many learn-... tutorials and self-contained examples.
see: https://github.com/dwyl/?q=learn 😍

Both our team members, clients and the wider community find our learning/tutorials/examples relevant and useful to the extent that in some cases our tutorials are more popular than the "official" docs. 😮

We encourage everyone to contribute to the repos with updates, improvements, typo fixes, etc.
and so far we've had contributions from several hundred people from around the world! 🌍 🎉
https://github.com/dwyl/start-here#who ... our plan is to grow this to thousands of people. 📈

What's in it for me? 💭

As an individual (developer/designer/tester/QA) you may ask: What's in it for me?
This is a fair question (though it's one you should have got "out of the way" a long time ago).

Ideally everyone writing code for a living is already intrinsically motivated to learn new tricks/tools/techniques and programming languages with a regular frequency.

By definition, if you aren't moving forward (relative to your technical peers) you're falling behind.

Learning new things means you retain and increase your personal "sharpness" continue your progress toward Personal Mastery.

It means the world goes from looking like this:

To you being able to "see everything" like a "master builder" and being able to "build a spaceship":

Note: this reference may be wasted if you haven't seen The Lego Movie ... watch it!! It's awesome!

Knowledge Work? >> Creative Technologist 🦄

Some people refer to software developers as "knowledge workers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy ... I feel this does not actually reflect what we do.
Yes, accumulating knowledge is important, but we don't get hired for knowing how to do something,
we get compensated using our knowledge to create useful products/services.

Getting Paid to Learn?! 🤓+ 💻 + 📚(+🔍) = 💰 (|>🏡☀️🏄⛵️ ...)

Almost no companies/organisations actively encourage their team members to learn new skills "on the job" and share their knowledge/learning in public. (public is the key distinction here)
We don't just share the odd "blog post", we share everything.
There's a very good reason for that: we want everyone to be able to acquire our knowledge.
We understand that knowledge is not our "key differentiator".
As creative workers we differentiate ourselves by our experience, creative output examples ("portfolio") and work ethic.
Once you understand that your "career progression" (at any company!) directly depends on how much knowledge you share, you can begin to pace yourself to share what you learned every day.

Find/Forge Your Own Path! 💡 >> 🚀

If you want to learn something new just start! (always have a "bias toward action"!)

Later, having tried it for yourself, if you want to use a particular tech/tool/feature/language @dwyl,
simply open an issue in /technology-stack/issues and "make the case".
We all want to learn/use new tools, that's the point of a "learning organisation".

Few careers allow people to decide their own direction and focus on a preferred speciality.
The industries that do allow self-direction are the "the professions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession and even then, there is a pre-defined "menu" to chose from.
Sadly, - or thankfully, depending on your perspective on self-directed learning - software development/engineering does not have a "charter", "association" or applicable international laws
the way Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers and Accountants do.
Web developers do have a "standards body" (the W3C) though you wouldn't know it from viewing the the webhint.io score for the home page of various prominent websites:
https://webhint.io/scanner/0037f23f-26fc-4d3b-81f4-eb8e6c41ab24

No surprises. But you'd think they had the resources to make their site standards-compliant. 😕

Define a Personal Learning Goal for Each Project 🎯

Each time you join a new project - preferably before -
you should think about the project's goal and exactly what problem/challenge is being solved.
(if the project does not have clear goal, first attempt to help the Product Owner/Team to focus)
Next think about how you can (personally) benefit from working on the project
and specifically what feature/functionality you have not built before.
Find an aspect of the project that is either new (you have not attempted to solve it before)
or a refinement (something you've built before on a previous project, and want to do much better this time!) you want to build as "world class" and write it down. 📝

if you aren unable to define a Personal Learning Goal for the project, write that down. 📝
The act of forcing yourself to write something down means you have made the effort to think about learning goals/objectives. It's not a "failure" if you haven't found something to learn. 😕
This in itself is a learning experience: discovering what to learn is just as important as how to learn.
As always, if you're "stuck", ask for help, that's the whole point of being on a team! 🆘 >> 🚁

[rub1e]

Obviously this applies in a slightly different way to me than to people in dev roles 💻; but taking a step back, my learning goal from working with Ines and Nelson in an Operations capacity was mainly to get a sense of how small businesses work.

And I get this in spades! Not only do I get to learn useful and transferable skills, but dwyl's approach to publicly sharing knowledge means everything I've done and learned has been documented for me to revisit and reuse (my own business partner used Ines's GDPR repo to get himself up to speed on privacy, for example).

I've worked for companies that didn't bother with setting personal goals or objectives; I've worked for companies where managers tell you what your learning goals are with scant input from yourself; I've worked for companies where you set your own objectives in a custom framework with a picture of blue skies or a railway track on the front, then you put them in a drawer for six months until someone comes up with a new custom framework with a lightbulb on the front, which will then sit in a drawer for another six months.

Ultimately it's up to you how you go about this or how seriously you take it. But really, you should be very pleased to be working with people who take this approach to personal development 💙

[iteles]

I really wanted to leave a little space for everyone else to add their learning goals but seeing as @rub1e has been the only one so far (💙), I thought I'd add mine too, they can't wait any longer!

Project: https://github.com/dwyl/product-roadmap, with a focus on dwyl/technology-stack#67

Learning Goals:

• Elm
  • https://github.com/dwyl/learn-elm
  • https://github.com/dwyl/learn-elm-architecture-in-javascript
  • https://github.com/dwyl/todo-list-javascript-tutorial
  • https://github.com/dwyl/learn-elm a second time
  • https://github.com/dwyl/learn-tdd
  • Expected OMTM outcome: Contribute 10 commits (and corresponding issues) to the learning tutorials in December & set a goal for what I can contribute to ATM by the end of the month (once I better understand what's possible)
• Analytics
  • Read Lean Analytics to better understand what data is the most useful and how to support small businesses in analysing that data for actionable conclusions
  • Expected OMTM outcome: Share all of the knowledge here by creating /learn-analytics & feeding this into the roadmap for ATM (opening one issue on this) by end of December

Project: https://github.com/dwyl/home/

Learning Goals:

• I have a general goal of learning everything I can about construction and renovation but for the immediate term, I want to learn about lighting, its effects on the human psyche and which lights are best for different environments
• Expected OMTM outcome: Finalise which lights will be in every room, corridor and work area by the end of December and buy them; commit research into home repo

Project: Club Soda Guide

Learning Goals:

• I don't have a specific learning objective, so I need to make this more SMART, but broadly, I want to pay enough attention to truly learn what's broken in our processes so that we can fix these before we launch all of our might into Extending "PETE" with Reusable Components So We Can Build People-Centric Standards-Compliant Data-Driven Apps Easier/Faster/Reliably technology-stack#67 without client project income (see Update repo to include Github Projects contributing#110 and Add labels automatically based on activity in 'Github Projects' dwylbot#181 for a starting point)
• Expected OMTM outcome: Updates to contributing