Picking Something to Learn

It’s been a while now — but every so often I get the urge to go learn something new. Sometimes related to my work, sometimes just for fun. My go-to back in the day was Coursera but over the last few years, I seem to have made a switch to Udemy. My degree is a Bachelor of Science with a Computer Science major, but my career path took a turn toward Product Management instead so I don’t really get hands-on with code in that context anymore.

These days, I know enough to be dangerous and when the developers are bullshitti- how to join the dots between our developer folk and marketing folk. I can be helpful in design and approach conversations but no one (including myself) is silly enough to let me anywhere near the code.

The last time I did any coding myself was for a 2D Unity course I picked up, where I got as far as putting together a rather basic brick-breaker game with a few levels and power-ups and then considered that itch scratched.

The itch is back!

I can source the causes too. It started with one of our projects at work involving the building of an IoT application on the Microsoft Azure stack and being interested in understanding the underlying serverless architecture and document database structure a little better. What has really cinched it though into action is that plus the likes of Tipa’s project to resurrect West Karana, UltrViolet’s building of a static blog infrastructure, Scopique’s adventures learning React and Pete’s discussion of his own history in development.

For the last few days, I’ve been looking at Udemy, just waiting for the right moment to pounce. (read: One of their many, many, many, sales to commence.)

Today it has!

Courses normally ~$90 for access are down to $12.99, so it’s a very tempting time to stack my cart with a few options to keep me busy going forward. I’d been scanning the preview content, seeing which lecturers I liked the voice and style of (very important, IMO!) and have decided to pick up these courses:

Picking a web course, in particular, was quite difficult as the absolute top, most popular options seemed to have fallen behind on updates and/or been handed over to less experienced hands to update. Code challenges on the more advanced topics are either absent or no longer working — and by far the code challenge approach is how I tend to learn the theory best.

Not entirely sure where I’ll start with this list yet. Not React, I’d refresh myself on JavaScript and get up to speed on the more modern variants (ala ES6 and TypeScript) first — but otherwise it’s a pretty open field.

The Java course has a certain nostalgic appeal — back when I did my CompSci degree, my university was using Java 5 as the language of choice. They even coded an Assembler emulator in Java for low-level coding papers. I hear they later moved on to Python which makes sense but I missed out on that.

I almost didn’t get the HTML and CSS course, particularly after the difficulty in finding a decent (updated) full-stack web developer course I was close to letting myself off the hook. I just find this aspect to be so booooring. WYSIWYG editors ftw! (No- stop; don’t throw those tomatoes!)

In any event, that’s a question for another day. Because today, Tales of Arise came out. :D So that’ll take my free time for the immediate future.

Note: By the time I publish this, the Udemy sale will be just about over- perhaps an hour or two left. But as noted in the post, they come up incredibly often. Just add a few things to wishlist if so inclined, and wait for a sale- they’re worth it!