Learning Again, Nov 2020-Mar 2021

While preparing for my new life and business in a new place, which is in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, since November 2020, I used a lot of time to learn new things.

Since 2015, when I started working on iOS app development, I’ve focused on iOS/Swift things and haven’t spent much time learning outside of the iOS/Swift world. This was a strategic choice and I learned a lot by exploring Swift. However, I felt the time has come to learn outside of iOS/Swift, to have broader and deeper knowledge about software development.

This is a simple list of things I’ve learned in these 5 months. I’m writing this primarily as a footprint of my career. However, it would be my pleasure if this gives some hints to developers who are ambitious to learn more.

(This is the same post as the one I wrote on Medium.)

Things I’ve learned

Programming languages

• Haskel

  • Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
  • Haskell Programming from first principles
  • FP AMS (Meetup)

• Rust

  • Tour of Rust

• Scala

  • Tour of Scala

• Languages themselves

  • Timeline of programming languages
  • History of programming languages
    (It seems functional programming principles are a part of the current trend of programming language features.)

• Category Theory: The theory behind Haskell

  • Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski (Lecture on YouTube)

• LLVM: Compiler infrastructure that supports lots of languages including Swift, Rust, Haskell, etc

  • My First Language Frontend with LLVM Tutorial
    One of my favorite lectures at my university was a workshop to make a C compiler by ourselves. Learning LLVM reminded me of the workshop.

• Javascript Engine: “How does a web browser work?”

  • V8 (JavaScript engine)

• Elm: a functional language for declarative UI

  • Elm
    Elm community looks nice as well!

Developers’ habit

As I like pair-programming and scrum workflow, I wanted to learn the origin of them.

• Extreme Programming Explained

Catch up on new swift usages

• SwiftUI Tutorials
• SwiftUI for iOS 14 from Design+Code
• Getting started with Swift on AWS Lambda
  While doing this tutorial, I used Docker for the first time.

Server-side

• Docker
  Docker seems so interesting to me…
• Updated my Server (Ubuntu)

Attend conferences

• MobileOptimized 2020 November 6-7, 2020
• GitHub Universe Virtual 2020 December 8-10, 2020
  Great conference. I learned a lot about OSS culture.
• VS Code Day 2021 January 27, 2021
• Community.o SUMMIT (by LLVM Foundation) March 8-10, 2021
  This was a relatively small, but dense conference. I got more interested in compiler technologies and their community.
• Mozilla Festival 2021 March 8-19, 2021
  Mozilla Festival was wonderful for people like me interested in interdisciplinary things, such as society, ethics, digital city, culture, art, and technology.

Career and software community

• Open Source Software culture
  • Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal
• Burnout (which seems quite common among software devs)
  • Burnout: five years later by Chris Eidhof
    Very encouraging post.
• Internet culture
  • インターネットを生命化する プロクロニズムの思想と実践
    A book about prochronism and the internet culture. It’s about how to save or express processes of digital content creation.

Freelance business

• Dutch business rules
• Financial stuff (bank, tax, accountant, …)
• Make resume and portfolio
• Update equipment (monitor, webcam, …)

Life improvement

• English study (business vocabulary, business writing, academic vocabulary, …)
• Explore Amsterdam and Dutch culture
• Learn Dutch

Retrospectives

• I really felt that a programmer constantly needs time to catch up with new things. Especially it’s important to know what’s happening outside of one’s primary tech stack. “20% rule ” like in Google seems to make sense in this point. As I became a freelancer, I hope I can gain control over the time I use.
• My interest in programming languages has become stronger. I want to learn more about Haskell because it’s so interesting to learn. I want to catch up with Rust because it seems promising. Learning more about LLVM feels interesting as well to know how languages work.
• I wanna keep my eyes on social things: open-source culture, areas between society and technology, and technology art. Even though I’m not sure what I can do, it might be good for me to invest a little bit more time in this area considering my interests and background, which is interdisciplinary information studies which I studied at university. At least it was very encouraging for me to know people with similar interests and struggles when I attended Mozilla Festival.