How Do I Keep Up with the Latest Technologies?

welcome to this episode of Dev questions with Tim Corey join us as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development understanding the industry and new technology if you are just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer this is the place to get your questions answered now here's your host expert developer and online educator Tim Corey how do I keep up with the latest Technologies technology is changing all the time there's new stuff coming in at a extremely rapid pace and it feels like especially right now so how do you keep up with it all well I'm going to give you my three layers of learning and how I keep up with as much of the technology as I can in the industry and really there's there's a fourth layer layer zero we'll talk about but that's the layers that I use to identify here's what I need to do for this technology okay so this question was asked on the suggestion site and if you have a suggestion for a future episode of Dev questions feel free to leave it there at suggestions.imcorey.com and hopefully you'll see your question answered on a future episode of Dev questions so I have three layers of learning like I said there's actually a fourth layer layer zero which layer zero is I just don't learn it I say you know what nope I'm going to ignore that but really that's for stuff that's just totally outside the realm of what I am doing for example you know if there's something you know cool and flashy that comes out about Java I'm not gonna learn it I'm just you know what cool I'm I'm glad for you I'm glad that if you like Java that it's it's something great for you it's just not something I'm gonna use because I'm not using Java every day so I'm not going to worry about even learning it but the three layers of things that I am going to learn something about things that might affect me because when you don't learn about something at all that's in your area you might have a gap in your knowledge for example for a long time I didn't know about Source control I didn't realize I should even know what it was or how it worked because I didn't think it was necessary for me but that was a gap in my learning that was a big problem I had to overcome so I've learned to have these three different layers to keep up with basically everything so layer number one we'll talk about all three layers and then I'll go over an example for each from my life to kind of give you an idea of of how I think about this okay so layer one is I know about this thing that's that's kind of the the surface level knowledge so I know basically what it is and what it does an example of this might be hey you know what I learned that Microsoft has this database thing called SQL Server um what is it well I know basically that it stores data relationally and that's from Microsoft and that it's used by a lot of of c-sharp applications that might be all you get that's what you know is the basics of it you know hey there's a database option out there for me if I ever decide I need a database option and it's SQL server and this is a relational database a little bit about it just enough to know can where it fits in the ecosystem so it's kind of layer one a lot of things fit into layer one there's a ton of things that I know about I know where they fit and I know that I'm not going to learn more about them at least not for now things don't have to be in layer One Forever but just having a high level knowledge about a lot of different things allows you to know where where the pieces are what what things are available should you ever need them this is really important to put as much as possible in this first layer because trying to cram everything in your brain all at once is just it's a recipe for disaster there's a lot of areas about c-sharp even even it's in a syntax where I'm like hey I don't use that very often so I don't know a ton about it and it's okay it's okay they don't have super in-depth on this piece they don't use it that often or it's not relevant to what I do so that's the high level level one level two goes a bit deeper and it's I know the basics of this thing so for instance hey I've played a bit I've made a simple prototype I've I've started to learn more about it I've used it a little bit I know how it works in a Basics I know the the general stuff may have gone through a tutorial or two and I just kind of played a little bit to understand where it fits in the ecosystem how it might work and how I might use this in a future application or project so that's layer two and then Layer Three is I want to use this thing this is where I've gone through layer one I've gone through Layer Two and now I want to go to layer three with this where I've built multiple samples I've tested the edge cases I've put this into a sample application so I've gone a lot deeper into this I've really dive deep into how to use it how to implement it what bugs are going to pop up if I use it certain ways what are the things I need to look out for how do I think about using this in a larger ecosystem you know all the stuff you need to know to really understand how to use a technology so that's my three layers for learning the the one that's the most full is layer one and that's just you know I know that it exists I know about it Layer Two I've got less things in but I know the basics of them and then layer three I have even less things in but I know how to use that thing so that's kind of my funnel for learning now let's talk about some examples of this from my own life right now so level one the things that I I know about this thing well Machine learning I know about machine learning c-sharp has some great tools for machine learning I've had people ask me hey can you do a video on machine learning and probably the answer is being no for a long time because I'm at layer one with machine learning I have seen it in demos I know that it takes a lot of math knowledge to really understand how to use it well and I know where I'd go if I wanted to learn more that's you know docs.net it's Microsoft documentation so um that's where I would go to learn more is Microsoft documentation the learn site because I know they have great tutorials there and they make a great place to get started but I'm not going to use machine learning there's a lot of math involved there's a there's a science to how to do it well and how to make sure that you understand the results and make sure the results are correct and this is all stuff that's it's really cool it's awesome it's fun but it's not something that is in my skill set well I can do math and I've gone through calculus one and two I've kind of left those behind I try to avoid doing in-depth math and so that's not my area where I want to spend a lot of time and so I have left machine learning at I know about this thing but that's where it sits now my level two to know the basics of something Ai and GPT tools so there's a ton of stuff around AI right now the the GPT let's use GPT accounting the overarching umbrella of everything that's out there for for tooling that right now there's a lot of tools out there allow you to integrate your your software into these machine Learning Systems these AI systems and you can build great things off of AI well I've gone a little deeper there because I was interested in hey how can I implement this in my own day-to-day operations so I built a prototype to get a transcripts and chapters and summaries out of a video I create and I figure out how to do that there's actually a really great tool out there now that does most of it for you and then I tweaked a local Docker version so I could automate it and so I could use bigger files I could have an offline version figure out how to do it so that I could you know run all of my YouTube content and even my paid content through it and verified how it works in fact there was a video on this channel where it didn't have captions and that was a glitch from YouTube I don't have access to tell YouTube hey put captains on this it just happens if it doesn't happen oh well unfortunately well I ran it through that video through the system generated the captions and put them on YouTube and they're great they work great so I want to learn more about and so I I learned the basics of it now what I did not do is build a full end-to-end application I didn't figure out how to get around some of the edge case stuff I didn't make sure that it would be work you know rock solid and that there were no bugs would cause problems I didn't verify and validate the code that I wrote to make sure that it was automated in a correct way so that I could you know reuse it and then deploy it and all the rest I didn't do that I just learned the basics and the reason why is because quite frankly I don't have the time to build the full application I'm getting there and I'm hoping to have some help with that at some point I might even hire somebody to I will hire somebody to do some of that work but I at least know the basics so I understand hey here's here's what I know and here's how I play with it and here's how it kind of integrates and here's the the pitfalls that I discovered and we need to work around and here's what I know we need to do in order to get started with this so that's level two I know the basics of it now level three is I want to use it and this is one that might surprise some people hopefully uh encourages people Unity so Unity is a game engine for building games with c-sharp and you know what it's been on my radar for a long time to teach you how to take your c-sharp knowledge and build some games well I have been working very hard on getting to level three and really going really deep in level three for annuity for a long time now I've built dozens of demo games I've tested my assumptions I've asked lots of questions to go deeper I've continued to build demos and test projects I've watched tons of tutorials I've figured out where the gaps are where people are confused I've figured out how to make this thing work and I've got you know one of the pitfalls and the the best practices and how do you make this right and do a great job So Gone really deep into unity and because of that you're going to see a lot of unity content coming out I think it really dovetails well with your C sharp skills hey you want to build a game great here is a engine and you can reuse your business skills or you want to take your your gaming skills the next level you can become a software developer like it it really dumb Tails well together using the c-sharp language but I needed to go deeper I couldn't just say hey I know the basics so let's go ahead and teach it now that's not fair and that's not a great way to teach because then you perpetuate some of the problems in fact I have seen a lot of that in the tutorials that I've watched where people say I don't really know C sharp so I just kind of do this and it works that's not a great way to learn because then you don't know it's magic and so when it breaks what happens and so I don't want to be there as a developer and I don't want to be there's a teacher either and so out a lot deeper to figure out why does it work that way and is there a better way of doing that and yes this way works but there's better options out there and here's why and so I've gone a lot deeper into my knowledge of that so those are the three layers of learning and kind of some examples of how I approach that in those three layers I don't do layer three for most things layer one like I said I know a lot about a little or a little about a lot how about that I know a lot about a little for layer three so it's important that you don't burn yourself out trying to get to layer three on everything accepts the fact that you're not gonna know everything about everything it's just there's too big of a swath of things you could do around even just C sharp which is a narrower set of the overall Market okay so accept the fact you won't know everything but make sure that you do go to layer three in the things that are most important to you okay the things that are most relevant to you make sure you have that knowledge of the things that are around that that might be of use so that we say hey you know what I need a database solution I know about five or six let's go deeper with these and figure out which ones might be useful narrow it down and then we'll go deeper into that one that we choose okay so that's my three layers to effectively learning what you need to in the industry hopefully that's been helpful thanks for listening as always I am Tim Corey [Music]

Channel: IAmTimCorey

Views: 8,970

Keywords: .net, C#, Visual Studio, code, programming, tutorial, training, how to, tim corey, C# course, C# training, C# tutorial, .net core, vs2022, .net 6

Id: GHRttOr6bQM

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2023