TLDR
If you want to be a good, cutting edge developer, code has to be one of your hobbies. Somehow, some way.

In addition to your day gig, you’ll find yourself reading, experimenting, sandboxing, building a project, going to meetups, and attending conferences. If you’re on the next-level tip, you’ll be contributing to open source code, technical blogging, teaching, or giving talks at meetups and conferences. 

I’m not saying that we have to do and know everything all the time, even though some people manage to, somehow. But if we want to keep up we have to do some of it regularly.

The only way to learn code is to write code, ultimately. Like learning a spoken language, it’s not something you can get from reading or watching tutorials. The physical act of typing, problem solving, struggling, researching, and building muscle memory for those repetitive bootstrappy chunks are the processes that ingrain a new language in the skillsets section of your mind. We’ve got to build those new neuron pathways every way we can.

Sometimes you just need to know enough to understand the high-level concepts, the pros and cons, and the state of the ecosystem.

But there have been a few times where I’ve watched tutorials for hours, understood everything, and then sat down with my laptop, fired up the IDE, and couldn’t for the life of me bang out snippets and examples, e.g. “Hello, World”, without googling or reading documentation.

Acceptance

Even when I’m expecting upheaval on the job, I’m almost always surprised when layoffs hit. It’s a shock. It means that my routine and my daily life are going to change drastically. Once I reach the acceptance stage, though, I can begin to see the possibilities.

If I’m honest with myself, by the time layoffs roll around in my direction, I realize that I could have left voluntarily much earlier and been in a better situation. A kick in the pants is always effective, though. It’s always easier to see the landscape clearly from the outside instead of inside.

Relaxation

When you leave a job or school, there’s a sensation of complete freedom. None of it is your problem anymore. Of course, the best circumstance is when you have another gig lined up so you’ve got freedom and no worries. It’s a perfect time to take a break, go on a vacation or staycation, take care of projects you’ve been putting off, declutter, see friends and family, etc.

That wasn’t my situation but I’m always keen for a break and a change of pace. Not crazy about the paperwork, though.

Of course, too much freedom can morph into boredom and restlessness. 
Seeing your financial padding, if you’re lucky to have any, drop precipitously each month turns into an adrenaline thrill ride after a while. Reality sets in. That leads to…

Stress

Stress is one of those two-edged sword situations. It can be depressing, paralyzing, and/or a powerful motivator. Maybe all of the above.

I’ve had two long layoff periods in my career. Starting my career at Apple kind of ruined me. Where do you go after the perfect job? Obviously, there’s no such thing as a perfect job, but I was definitely spoiled right out of the gate. After about two years I was laid off from Apple when Steve Jobs returned to take the reins and dismantled the status quo. I had no idea what to do with myself.

The second, still in Silicon Valley, was when the tech bubble burst. That was a brutal time. You may remember news articles and TV spots about people with advanced degrees working at bookstores and coffeeshops to get by. Ultimately, it resulted in my moving back home to the east coast.

I got to the point where I couldn’t think straight. In retrospect, I was depressed and demoralized. In retrospect, I clearly see all the things I could and should have been doing that would have shortened those long layoff periods, probably. I should have been learning, networking, investing in classes to build on my skills and get my foot in the door. There was nowhere near the amount of resources back then that we have at our disposal now, but there were ways.

I learned from that.

Purpose

There were a lot of things I didn’t know that I didn’t know. Or the things that I had just brushed up against in my final year or so with General Dynamics. Many of them were just buzzwords to me at the time.

I was overwhelmed so I started digging, reading, watching and learning. I’m still overwhelmed but know enough to have a sense of the landscape, and I’ve gotten my hands dirty with the newness.

I started looking for classes, workshops, meetups, and bootcamps. The Mid-Atlantic is no slouch in the tech industry. I benefit from structure so I figured a class would be a good place to start. I decided I didn’t want to pay $12,000 for a coding bootcamp. I figured the $1,000 range would do. Udacity fit the bill. If I’m going to keep it real, the logistics of the timing, price, and structure determined the framework/library choice. If there had been an in-person Angular class or intensive instead, I would have gone with that.

It turns out that picking a framework and class with projects (whether online, in-person, or self-guided and regardless of the framework) incorporated all of the fragmented techniques and concepts in a practical and meaningful way. I could see the theory become praxis.

There are meetups like DC JavaScript Workshops, JavaScript DC, Learn to Code | Thinkful, DCJS,Turbo 360 – Washington DC React, Redux, Node Meetup,Angular DC, React DC,UX Design Workspace, JavaScript near Huntington Station

I looked for and found local tech and design conferences: RVA JS, World Usability Day with UXPA, and the upcoming Nation JS is Dec. 4th. There’s also Liberty JS that overlapped with RVA JS.

Confession: These are the things that I should have been doing over the past five years. I was doing plenty of other things. I’m a strong believer in work-life balance but I could have used a little more work-work balance. Or … work culture vs. industry culture balance, to be more precise.

In the future, I’ll chase the dream with more vim and vigor and hopefully evangelize future work cultures to do the same. Ideally, one’s work environment will encourage active learning and staying current.

And that’s that. In short? I’ve learned so much over the past six months that now I know what I don’t know.

How do you all stay current, motivated, and on the cutting edge?