Continuous Learning for Developers

Continuous learning is very important in IT. A break from learning new things for a couple of years can put you in the dark ages.
I have always known this and done my best to keep upskilling, but a few things I have read recently have reminded me how important this is.

Leading Change

John Kotter's Leading Change is a book about managing big change in organisations. It gives a set of steps that should be followed based on the author's experience with change efforts in large numbers of big companies. The most surprising thing about the book is a section at the end where he says that the thing that unites very successful people is lifelong learning.

Big Data

O'Reilly publish a weekly Data Science newsletter. It is well worth a spin if statistics and analysis are your thing. I think that an interest in data is in every developer's interest.
They published an article this week entitled Is your development team ready for Big Data?
Again one of the key skills that a developer should have to be able to handle the challenges of Big Data is continuous learning.

Values in Action

A few years ago I read Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman. The author had researched the things that make us happy. He analysed world religions to find commonalities which he called Values.  Then he devised a questionnaire which determined which of these virtues were 'yours'. The idea being that if you concentrated on pursuing your virtues you would be happier. The book does a much better job of explaining this and gives solid reasoning too. You can find the survey and others like it here.
Why this talk of happiness and values in a technology blog? Whenever I do this survey 'Love of Learning' comes up at the top of my virtues. Lucky me.


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