How to learn new tool, technology or anything effectively

Background

How to learn new tool or technology? Same as you, I also like reading many blogs about new tools, technology & trends. Most interesting problem I was facing was: “Tool or technology becomes outdated by the time I become so called expert of it”. After trying many things I finally composed a personalised “cheat sheet” which works great for me. I thought sharing it with all of you would help everyone and the result is my own blog with first post 🙂

 

How to learn anything?

 

1. Decide what to learn – Analyse market trends and what big daddy doing

It’s very important to decide what to learn next after every iteration. Analysis of market trends can be a good start to find which tool or technology is trending in your technology area.

Example: Google trends

Second step could be to find out what big daddy (Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.) are doing.

Example: Technologies used at Twitter

 

2. Always know inside story, how it works?

Knowing anything from inside helps us achieve expatriation faster. Let’s take example of past buzz word which has now became critical solution maker tool of complex business problem. Apache Spark

For example few facts about Spark

• It’s written in Scala
• It interestingly plays with memory (Memory management)
• One spark-context per jvm
• Perfect provision for Broadcasts & Accumulations

 

3. Read high quality code of famous frameworks

Mostly every open source framework is powered by strong community. Like in java, most frameworks are powered by best java guys on this planet. Many time we struggle to find & understand best “design patterns” which is one of the best capability any programming language can have in it.

The best place to understand such design patterns might be the high quality code written as a part of any popular framework.

For example: Spring Framework of java whose best in class code base is available at Github

 

4. Carry your own food with you

Very common thing we all say is: “I don’t have time to learn”. Let’s try to find time. How many times we have any of the following situation where we feel bored & have just nothing to do.

• Travelling to somewhere
• Attending functions
• Sit idle and many more situations like this

Moral of the story is carry things you need (mostly just smart phone which anyway we carry) to continue your learning.

 

5. Try out something good

It’s always nice idea to fail while trying something or experimenting something. While learning any new tool or technology only theoretical knowledge would not be enough. That’s the reason we have Github to start our public experiments. Pick up any problem which can be solved using the new tool or technology you just learned.

Next step is to do hands-on. Code & solve that problem yourself. Because we all know, application has no bugs till we haven’t added one while implementing it 😉

 

6. Follow famous personalities on social network

It is but obvious that people writing new tools & technology knows better then us that “What is going to be the next technology going to rule the market”.

Open twitter and start following them. Their tweets will be great guidance to us.

 

Conclusion

There is no single and one way of learning. Try few things and identify what is working best for you. Might be something from above works for you as well as it is already working for me. Happy learning.