How Do you Decide What to Learn Next? What's Your Strategy?
How Do you Decide What to Learn Next? What's Your Strategy?
It is always challenging to choose a new stack or language to learn. There are so many to pick from.
Backend Engineers want to learn Front End Tech Stack and vice versa, but then someone releases a new stack that overcomes the challenges you face with your current tech stack, and now you don’t know which one to start with.
Personally, I have never picked a stack based on its popularity. Something super popular on StackOverflow might not have many job openings.
Recently, I wanted to explore Kotlin but was not quite sure about it for two reasons,
Unless I was planning to build mobile apps, Kotlin and Java have similar strengths in programming backend applications.
Learning a programing language takes time, and I wanted to make the right decision.
This is where I used a framework.
Am I learning a new language just for fun? No
What is the intention? To build a different kind of application than what I have built previously. I have mainly worked on backend applications and API development. So something new would be -
Data Science
AI/ML
Front End Web
Mobile Applications
Python is the favorite choice for the first two, but we have matured Java libraries to play around everyday use cases like NLP.
Also, I stick to the backend alone whenever I build an application because I’m scared of building Front End. That’s a good reason to pick Mobile or Front End development.
Do I know a language that will get me well-paid projects at least for the next couple of years? Yes
So this new language is not necessarily something I need to learn to stay in the job market.
If I come up with a Billion-dollar-idea, do I have the skills to build them today? No. I would need to hire someone to build the front end.
Using the data from the above 4 questions, I decided to learn TypeScript. I’m still unsure which framework to pick, but I enrolled in a TypeScript tutorial for now.
I hope my framework helps you choose your next stack or language.