[Chicago] Ask ChiPy: How would you invest on building skills this year?

[Chris Foresman]

Vokal is very supportive of continued education, offering a $2,000 per year budget for each employee to spend attending conferences or taking online or offline classes. From my experience with that, $100 doesn’t get you very far. Either classes are free (meetups, etc) or exorbitantly expensive (e.g. AWS devops certification costs $2,000, Scrum master training is like $2,400, Beazly’s class is a couple grand, etc).

I supposed I’d spend the $100 on a Raspberry Pi or similar setup and a handful of components to experiment with. I think that would get me the most bang for my buck.



Chris Foresman
chris at chrisforesman.com



> On Jan 20, 2016, at 12:47 PM, Loren Velasquez <lm.velasquez12 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I learn by doing so I would try to get an internship or something where I have a defined problem and try to work my way to fixing it. I think books are helpful but I would rather have something more hands-on. I would probably enroll in some courses and use the $100 that way. 
> 
> Best Regards,
> Loren
> 
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Joshua Herman <zitterbewegung at gmail.com <mailto:zitterbewegung at gmail.com>> wrote:
> If I have $100 to spend to improve myself I probably would invest in
> buying books related to data science and machine learning. I actually
> have done this. One of the books I bought is Python for Data Analysis:
> Data Wrangling with Pandas,
> NumPy, and IPython
> 
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 7:56 AM, Randy Baxley <randy7771026 at gmail.com <mailto:randy7771026 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > Get involved with http://freegeekchicago.org/ <http://freegeekchicago.org/> and there SC3 hackers either
> > in person or on github, visit http://pumpingstationone.org/ <http://pumpingstationone.org/>,
> > http://chihacknight.org/ <http://chihacknight.org/> and http://www.blue1647.com/ <http://www.blue1647.com/>.
> >
> > Consider the holes between fun coding and productive coding in my own path:
> >
> > http://randy7771026.wix.com/codepath <http://randy7771026.wix.com/codepath>
> >
> > which I think are finding an IDE/coding environment that suits me and
> > considering https://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses <https://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses> though you
> > will quickly blow that c note.
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 7:23 AM, Tathagata Dasgupta <tathagatadg at gmail.com <mailto:tathagatadg at gmail.com>>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Hello ChiPy,
> >> When I see the mentees on stage showcasing their newly acquired skills -
> >> it makes me extremely happy and proud. And a bit jealous!
> >>
> >> Learning new skills is critical for software developers to be relevant in
> >> this fast moving land of technology.
> >>
> >> Say you have 100 dollars earmarked to become a better developer this year.
> >> How would you spend it - what would you want to learn, which books would
> >> you buy, any courses that you would take?
> >>
> >> How do you adjust your schedule to make room for picking up the new skill?
> >>
> >> --
> >> Cheers,
> >> T
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >>
> >
> >
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