Dedicated Project Time

02 May 2017

For me the best way to routinely go to the gym is to have a friend looking to go as well. You help motivate each other to go even when you're tired, or sore from the day before, or are thinking of the dozen other things you want or need to do before going to bed.

I also found this approach works well with programming. It's no secret that programming (especially fields like webdev where new tools are coming out all the time) is a skill set that requires upkeep, maintenance, and some time outside of work to keep your skills honed. Otherwise you may find yourself pigeon holed into a particular language/framework.

To facilitate learning in my off hours I recruited a friend and co-worker to join me. Twice a week we spend ninety minutes doing some programming related learning. For me the focus has been React and standing up servers from scratch (next post will be about getting a raspberry pi web server up and running).

I've gone as far as to implement "5% time" at work. I talked to my bosses about the merits of encouraging our devs to learn new technologies or skills. So now every Friday after lunch we have time set aside to work on anything programing related that we want. This has lead to front-end folks learning python (and vice versa), people porting existing Objective-C projects to Swift, or toying with Big Data/Machine Learning, and more. The most exciting part is that some of the work done during this time has become the inception for something new to add to our production apps as well!

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