This article is my take on the chapter with the same title from the brilliant book The Pragmatic Programmer. You should absolutely give that a read if you haven’t already.

I often use programming or investing analogies when I talk about real-life stuff. Using investing analogies to talk about programming stuff is super fun for me, and hopefully, it will be fun for you too.

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1. Serious Investors Invest Regularly — As a Habit

Your most important asset as a software developer is the knowledge and experience stored inside your brain. However, this is an expiring asset. With the technology landscape evolving at breakneck speed, if you don’t attend to this regularly, its value will diminish year by year.

Unfortunately, you can’t just lay back and let your current investments earn dividends for you. You constantly have to rebalance your portfolio and, most importantly, invest more than you take out.

In other words, always be learning something new. The most important thing is to build a habit of lifelong learning. Here are a few goals that I am for:

Learn at least one new language/technology each year

I don’t mean become an expert in a new language or technology every year, but seeing different approaches that solve similar problems is a great way to become a better developer.

The skills you pick up along the way will probably prove useful even if you don’t plan to earn a living coding in that language.

Your options for learning a new language are basically limitless, including free YouTube tutorials, paid online courses, technical books, and blog posts.

I lay out my decision-making process for picking new languages to learn below.

#startup #data science