Learning Together

As I expressed before, learning is inevitable in the tech industry. It's undeniably essential for your growth and, unfortunately, you might struggle to find something that works for you. Some folks preach "learning in public" where you commit (usually on social media) to a learning journey, the expectation is to provide updates on what you learn along the way. This type of commitment is a way to keep yourself accountable.

I don't think that's for everyone. The alternative though shouldn't be learning alone. I find value in a form of commitment to keep you on the right track. While I had no trouble learning on my own, I wanted to try something new. My team started mentioning Rust here and there, especially since we've been exploring WASM more and more. I seized the opportunity to learn if anyone wanted to learn Rust. The answer was unanimously yes!

The next step was coming up with a learning path that was fun and didn't feel like work. We put together a list of projects to pursue in our free time. Every 2 weeks we would update each other on any progress made and any learnings. The alternatives that we discarded were: reading a book together, doing exercises, doing the same project and comparing notes. None of them felt fun enough so everyone picked a project they were excited about (real-time, game dev, CLI tools, ...)

Thoughts

Learning doesn't have to be boring or isolating. This can have the potential to develop strong relationships within your team. Make sure you work on creating a safe space where everyone feels comfortable saying "I don't know" or "I don't understand this". I can't stress enough how important that is and how quickly it unlocks all sorts of collaborations. Additionally, it helps you learn a lot faster. We'll see if I'm right about this. I'll try to keep this experiment up and see how it goes. I'll update you in a few months, stay tuned!