Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Rubber Duck Dev Show. I'm Chris.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: And I'm Kristen.
[00:00:04] Speaker A: And today we are going to talk about developer continuing education.
How do you keep growing as a developer? Even, you know, even senior developers keep learning and learning and learning every day.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Because if you don't, you're going to be left behind.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: That's right. You'll be programming the cobalt mainframes in the one bank that still uses them somewhere in the US.
I mean, job security, I suppose. But anyway, we'll talk about that in a little bit. But before we do, week in review, how was your week?
[00:00:36] Speaker B: A blur, basically.
Thanksgiving is coming up next week, but like doing database consulting and throwing in some rails consulting with it and managing all the work going on with the people that I'm working with and working on the course, my performance optimization course for postgres. Just a lot of stuff, nothing really interesting to mention, unfortunately.
Yeah, no real insights I can convey, unfortunately. How about you?
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Kind of the same. Just a blur. It's a continuation of my report from last week. Just hyper busy.
I'm pulling the 60 to 80 hours weeks now just because we've got a crunch to get the December 15 code freeze finished and I've got a number of big clients waiting on things, so got to just push. But sometimes that's just the developer's life. Sometimes you just got to push.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Well, any person, developers.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Right.
Okay, so continuing education CE we've both been doing this for a day or two and both of us have spent a lot of time over our careers learning new things constantly. And there's a lot of different ways to learn things, even the ways you have access to, to learn things changes over your career kind of changes week to week, honestly. But there are a lot of ways to learn and we're going to talk about some of the ways to keep yourself up to date, to get yourself going if you're a newer developer and to not look like an old washed out has been if you're a senior developer, which is a constant struggle for me. So anyway, let's start off with kind of newer developers.
If you're trying to learn Ruby, let's talk about Ruby and rails because that's the areas we're most familiar with. Right. If you're trying to learn Ruby and or rails, what are places that you like to go to? Or point junior developers to, to say, hey, here's where you can start learning stuff?
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Well, there's also, I think for someone who's totally new, I would probably choose a visual medium I kind of thought through this episode a little bit differently and kind of looked at different medium perspectives. So, I mean, I would look on YouTube and Go Rails has their site and has a lot of channels as well as there's. Oh, my gosh, what is that course?
Who's the guy that does the beginner's rails course?
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Beginners. Rails.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Can't even remember his name right now, but.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: I can't either. But, yeah, like go rails, they've got all these pads and one of them is Ruby for beginners. It's Funny that this actually, on our discord yesterday, someone from the Dragon Ruby community had reached out to me and they were like, yeah, I know Ruby fairly well, but I want to learn rails, so where should I go? So I pointed them to the go rails and asked Chris, exit three, where should you probably go if you're in this situation?
And so he pointed us to one of these paths and said, there's all kinds of paths for beginners, but this is a really good site because it's got a lot of well structured learning paths to go to.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: So I found it.
The site is learn enough.com and it's basically learn enough to be dangerous.
And he's the one that originally did the, I hate to say back in the day, but the original, I think, Ruby on Rails course that first came out, or the most comprehensive One.
He has a lot of other courses now, but it's his think it's Ruby on Rails one is the One that has been done the most or whatever.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Right. This RUby on Rails tutorial I haven't looked into.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: But, but for years, that had been like the go to, but pragmatic has their stuff, too. And of course there's books and stuff, but I don't know, I feel any more.
Well, not that they're declining.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Books aren't as much of a thing as when we were starting our careers, because when I was starting out, when I was first learning Ruby and rails, it was books. When I was learning Java or I was learning. You went and got books, but that's when we actually had bookstores that you could go to.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I would go to the Barnes and Noble and the Borders and Walden books if I had to.
And I bought books upon books. I mean, not just Ruby on rails, but, like everything, anything. Like when I started Ruby on Rails, what did I do? I went and I got a.
That's. And that's how I learned it.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: And books are good for a lot of things. For me, though, what I've discovered over my career is that I'm much better at short visual observational training. I learn much better in that medium. So, like watching a five minute video on a particular topic, that's the way.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: Most people are, actually, because when you look at it. So we had books, so it's just the written word.
There's some advantages to that. But your audio sense, your hearing sense does not get fed at all through that. Your visual sense does not get fed at all. I mean, you have to basically think about, I mean, there's graphs and stuff, whereas being able to visually see and have moving animation and displaying something like, I can't tell you how many blog posts I've looked at trying to explain how to read and explain plan from postgres.
And it's just hard. Whereas if you watch it on a video, they say this section means this. And then this is.
And they can run a command and you can see the changes. To me, it's so much easier to understand or to grok what's going on.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Right?
Yeah. And I think it's funny, this thing yesterday on the discord actually started from this guy from the dragon Ruby saying, hey, I'm wanting to learn this rails. And I found this humble bundle of these books. Are these good books to get? And I was looking at the books and I'm going, these are all great books, but they're ten years old, so they're not what you need.
I know that there's a lot of people, like, we've had some on the show, like Nick and Colin, they love to have these old books and collect them and they'll buy them when they find them, just from a historical and nostalgia perspective. And the books have a lot of good concepts in them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the books are useless.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: Yeah, but here's the thing.
A lot of the examples don't keep up with the pace of time. It's like it gets rusty. A lot of the core concepts are good, so those are still reusable. But like trying to run examples, imagine trying to run a Ruby, excuse me, a rails one example today, in any capacity, it's good luck.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And one of the books in that humble bundle was about Ruby 1.9. And I'm like, okay, yeah, okay.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: But still very relevant. But I bet you're going to run into problems at some point with it.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: Yeah. And then you're just going to end up having to relearn how things are actually done now in Ruby three that they weren't doing in Ruby nine. And that you had to have all these workarounds or long code paths and stuff like that, and then they've solved a lot of these problems.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. When you actually look at Ruby three code, it's kind of like, what is this? I didn't learn this right.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: I think books are just, I like having books and there are some books that are really good for learning reference books, things like the coding patterns, the, all the agile type books that teach you how to do agile programming. Those kind of concept books are good, but learning the actual language itself I think is better fitted to current visual technologies. Videos and blog posts, even blog posts can get long in the tooth really quick because like we've talked about before, JavaScript has a new flavor every week.
So I think books from a language learning perspective get out of date too fast. So I never recommend new people.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Well, I mean, go.
Yeah, well, I mean the courses are the same way. I mean, like I did this ansible course a number of years ago prior to the release of Ansible 2.0, and I released it, I got some sales of course from it and I kind of was basically, they started advancing forward with the different versions and I kind of ran out of time to go back and refresh it. I mean, I kept using, I'm still using Ansible, I'm doing ansible for some consulting and whatnot, but I'm so busy with everything else, I haven't had time to go back and revisit that course. And then, plus it's not as popular, I think, as it once was in terraform seems to be, although they got theirselves water and hot water recently, but that seems to be the more popular option people are looking at. So maybe not as many people are looking into ansible. So there's a reason I haven't decided to do. You know, there's a lot of stuff that changes, so this has a negative connotation. But much as a books content can rot, a course is the same way. I think it's just the nature of technology and how fast it's moving.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: So I don't think it's books, it's courses as well, because you need to keep your courses or up to date.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Right. And any of that static type content, I hate to say like video courses are static, but they are. I mean, once they're recorded, they're recorded. Just like our show is static. Once it's recorded, it's recorded. Right. And three years from now, the information we're conveying here is going to be kind of out of date.
Not all of it. I mean, some of it is conceptual stuff that always.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah, the non conceptual parts.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: Right. So that's one of the reasons that my habit is I look for short videos on specific topics. I want to see five or ten minutes on how to do this very specific thing because those things can be updated quickly and kept up to date. You can always find the latest five minute video on those. Most people who do those videos, if there's a significant change in that area, they'll make a new one on this topic and it's not as hard to keep those up to date. Whereas if you've got like a four hour course on rails, well, that's going to go out of date pretty soon, and then you have to do a whole other four hour course.
And what I'm seeing is there aren't a lot of those type of things anymore. There used to be, but more of what I'm seeing now, even at places like go rails and stuff like that that have these courses, there are smaller, more bite sized videos that teach very specific concepts that can be easily replaced when they need to.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: I was just looking at there, well, there's different lessons and they're all bite sized, but still, they would still need to be refreshed at a periodic basis.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Right. But what I'm saying is even though they've got like this ruby for beginners course they've got. Right. Is almost 6 hours, of course, but that's ten different videos. So they're smaller videos. So if they need to take one out of the middle of that because it's gotten long in the tooth, they just replace that.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Well, that's the way most all video courses are kind of being done now.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: Right. Well, and that's what I'm saying is that it didn't used to be that way, but that's the way I'm finding almost everything now.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Okay, well, that's kind of the format I'm used to.
Of the short ones.
Well, the only reference I have of something longer is, like we said back in the day, we had books and then we had in class training.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: So you went for like, I remember going off site for five days to be trained on Microsoft SQL Server and learn anything and everything in the class environment.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: And then by the time you got home, that stuff was out of date. Well, no, it wasn't moving quite that fast back then.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: It was drinking for the fire hose. But what was significant about that is that, and I think it's different from what's significant about that is it helped get you a transformation, meaning that whenever I need to this kind of differs from what you're saying, but I kind of consider them differently. If I'm going to make a transformation a step change, I need to entirely learn a new framework, I need to entirely learn a new database, need to entirely learn something. Then I'm saying, okay, what is the best book I can consumE, what is the best course I can consume and dedicate 6 hours like this other course or 10 hours or whatever it is to say okay, be ensconced in it to really learn what's going on, then I do that. But once I have gone through one of those, then I do the piecemeal things, kind of what you're talking about because there's little point things I'm not getting. And then I seek out oh, five minutes on know Google, hey, how do you do this? And you get response.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: And I yeah, I think that's over the course of know you drink from the fire hose at first, but then it gets to a point where you're okay. Now I need to know how to do this specific thing. So I'm going to spend an hour learning this specific thing and then I'm going to go get back to my regular day job.
And you're constantly learning, just doing your day job, you're learning little bits and bobs as you go.
And it gets to the point where you don't really need to take courses unless you're doing like you said, big framework changes.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: Well if you're wanting to make some change then I think that is the point at which I invest in a course.
[00:18:03] Speaker A: Right.
But for continuing, I mean just day to day career continuing education, because even if you stay on the same path and you're not making major framework changes, you still need to be learning all the time because.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Exactly.
I consider that a refinement. So it's like, yeah, so I watch YouTube videos or I look at a blog post or have a newsletter and I see okay, what new things are they talking about here? So I think once you have that base of knowledge, that's where all these things now what's super interesting, if you remember back when you started development again, there were books as there was in class training and that was pretty much now because now there are podcasts, Yahoo's like us talking about software development.
There's video courses, there's YouTube, there's email newsletters, there's blogs. It's just insane the amount of information that's being produced, right.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Of my, one of my favorites is the short Ruby newsletter by Lucian Ginda.
He's been on our show a couple of really, really good, but this kind of gives you weekly. He puts out these little short, well, they're getting longer, but they've got little blurbs about stuff that he finds all over the place. And it's just little nuggets, which is really good for my brain.
But there's all kinds of newsletters for Ruby and rails. This happens to be one of my personal favorites, but there's lots of ways to consume that information.
What's good about this is this actually points me to good videos for my brain.
So I know that I'm sitting here armchair quarterbacking this stuff because I've never put together one of these big tutorials. Like, I do a lot of teaching, but it's usually kind of in person or little bits and bobs here and there. I've never put together something like a go rails or those kind of courses. So I'm going to shut up and let you talk about because you've done some coursework, you've done course development stuff and talk about what kind of things have to go into something like go rails or the postgres stuff that you do.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Yeah, basically what I look at it is getting a transformation for someone because that's what I think the intent of a course is. In other words, you're at this level.
Show my hand in the video and you want to get to this level. So I think courses are a good use case for that. So, for example, when I was doing talking about my ansible course that I did, there were people that were rolling their own servers at the time to get Ruby and rails up and running. There were some people that used Heroku, but there were some people that wanted to learn how to do it. And I had gotten to the point, know, I had heard about chef and Ansible, these configuration management tools for a while. I kind of learned it and I built my own infrastructure with it. And I said, oh, this is great.
I love learning this and setting it up and whatnot.
And I said, oh, well, maybe I could do a course on it. So basically I set up and said, okay, you're here for the person who wants to learn something, how to do this. I can have you get you to get to this point where you can deploy your own rails application.
And I kind of took them through the different roles that needed to be created within ansible and all the different tasks that needed to be done. And basically this is kind of how I tend to set up my infrastructure so they could take that and then apply it to their own environment to create their own way of doing it, rather than relying on like at the was, if you weren't using something like Chef or Ansible, you were using your own configuration scripts or basically a lot of role your own.
And in terms of recording, I mean, I basically had a limit. I can't remember what the limit was. In other words, I didn't want any particular training course to, excuse me, any particular video to exceed ten minutes.
So I just did it and I broke it up into sections. All right, we're going to cover this and have the code along with it on the same page. And that's kind of how I presented it when I was doing the course. I haven't looked into the go rail stuff because I know some other ways of doing courses. They actually do interactive tests as a part of it. And I don't know if they're doing that, like, for example, like code.
Don't that know a business here or in Orlando. And they did a lot of the rails, I think rails for zombies or something.
One of the thing that got them really known, where they put you in a sandboxed environment on a web application and you basically typed code and answered questions correctly or incorrectly, and it graded your responses.
So that is another level. It requires a lot more programming to be able to achieve that type of a course. But that's not what I did. Basically, mine was just videos. Here's the code and explaining kind of why I'm doing what I did and how the different system works.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it's hard to put those kind of things together.
I've had to put things together internally for companies and stuff like that, but I've never put together like an online courSe. But I do know that there's a lot of prep and a lot of the editing takes forever. All this stuff takes a lot of time to put together.
And I think that those things are underutilized a lot of time, especially by senior developers.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: You mean a video course?
[00:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah, video courses.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: They seem to be consumed more by newer developers who are trying to get the fire hose going.
But I think there's a missing out by senior developers on looking at this stuff because one of the things that I've noticed when we were doing the live coding shows and I've been watching other people live coding, just kind of hanging out on Twitch or YouTube and watching some other people code and stuff and talking to them. And I learn a tremendous amount of stuff just from watching somebody else code and explain what they're doing.
Even as a senior developer, even if it's something I know really well how to do, I'll still learn something from this other person's approach.
And so I think it's still really valuable for senior developers to get into these courses too. And even looking at like Ruby for beginners on go rails, I guarantee you, even though I've been doing this for a million years, I'm going to go look at that course and I guarantee that I will learn things in every one of those videos.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the thing too.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: I would encourage senior development. Not only that, but what I'm finding is it kind of rejuvenates your passion for coding because you'll get some aha moment from them explaining something and go, all right, and I can use that for this. And you start getting energized again and start discovering your passion for it again just by kind of getting back to basics and watching what other people are explaining about it.
It's been a really good experiment for me. I've been doing that with watching live coding and looking at some newer videos, training videos and stuff, and it's been kind of eye opening and it's making me like programming again.
So kind of how I was feeling when I switched over to Dragon Ruby and just did some Ruby coding wasn't rails.
Yeah.
For me, continuing education is very well served by these kind of courses.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
I also do like the scaling postgres talking about the difference between, I guess I kind of put them into two groups, continuing education and someone wanting a transformation type thing. So like continuing education, that's kind of like my scaling postgres and this show that goes out weekly. So like scaling Postgres episode is produced a week. Every week. It's ten to 15 minutes in duration and it just says, all right, what's going on in postgres this week? So it talks all about stuff going on, much like we do sometimes we do current topics, but we talk about issues related to software development from a continuing education perspective. But I haven't done anything with postgres yet that actually does a transformation type thing that I'm talking about. So that's kind of what I'm planning for the course now. This is just the course page. It's not here yet. And this is what we talked about last week. This is this free performance starter kit I set up. This is just to kind of get if you're interested in the course, this is just kind of giving you an introduction on getting started with it. But like the course that I'm going to be working on, it's all about postgres performance optimization. So its intent is for, if you are a developer or some sort of engineer that wants to understand how to optimize your database better and get more performance out of your queries, or even just reduce the utilization of the database system itself. Because, like, I've taken in some of my consulting arrangements, I've taken a database that was running at 80% CPU utilization, and I go in and look at the top queries and make each of them more efficient using different methods, and then the CPU utilization gets down to 20%. So it's the same load, same application load. But now they were thinking, oh, we're going to have to upgrade our database. Well, now you don't have to.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Right?
[00:30:17] Speaker B: So it's that kind of knowledge that I'm kind of covering in the course to kind of make a transformation. Meaning if someone wants to go from a little bit of a neo fight, someone who doesn't know that much about how to make postgres perform optimally, I want to kind of get them as far as they can go and kind of share what I do, what I see in my consulting, to try to get to where the level I'm at in terms of skill, so that they can then take it back to their job and then apply it there and looked up on as a database wizard.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: Right. And that's really the reason that you want to invest in courses like this, is because, like, for instance, let's say the postgres stuff, you spent years learning all these things, trial and error research, all figuring out what works and what doesn't, and something that may have taken you months to figure out, you can teach somebody in five or ten minutes, because now you know all the tricks and they don't have to spend months figuring it out. So that's what you're trading for.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the thing. If you want a fast transformation, I think a course is the best way to do it. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. Right, because the options are okay, yeah, you could take the course, or I think, how many episodes of Scaly pro scratch are 290. I just did 291. Or you could watch those.
That'll take you a day.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: Take a hot second.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: So that's kind of what I'm going with.
And for this course, I've had exposure to another type of course that wasn't in technology, but it had a live component to it.
They encouraged people to get together and team up fellow students.
And there were live discussions that were happening and the course got released over time. So it's kind of a hybrid of an in person class you would go to and online course at your own pace.
So I felt more for this other course I'm talking about. I felt more motivation to actually get in and do it because I know there were going to be others there doing it because, ashamed to say sometimes I've bought video courses that, gee, you were on Black Friday sales and I never watched them. SO it's like, okay, I've done this, but I kind of haven't committed to doing it. Whereas with this other course that I'm talking about, I took it and it's like, I know every week there's something going on. It's kind of a reminder it's there. It's not like. Because normally when you buy one of these online video course things or you become a part of it, it's not. They're sending you emails and saying, hey, did you finish the course? Or, hey, did you do this lesson? Or this module? Or, hey, did you. It's just kind of like you buy it and you're done. It's worse. Kind of like a book, and I've bought books before that I never really read all the way through, much like my video game library. It happens.
But what I'm going with my course is trying to emulate this experience I had. And my intent is to release a module a week and have actually live lessons as a part of it and have people be able to be there and ask questions. Because I'm going to build as large a database as I can, like a multi terabyte database with billions of rows in it. And that will be kind of what the examples I'm using and showing and talking to people about it. But my hope is that they'll take the knowledge imparted and go back to their job or they'll take a look at, hey, some of their queries.
Not that they have to share anything, but they can work on it and then say, hey, I did this thing and it worked out great.
[00:34:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: So that's my goal for the performance optimization course I'm working on.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: Right. So if you want to know more about that, if you're into databases or postgres, or you just want to see how this kind of course experience turns out, go to scalingpostgres.com and sign up. Put your email address in. I promise you that Creston won't send you weird stuff in the mail and spam you and all that crap. He just sends you the information you need.
But if you want to be kept up to date on what's going on with that course, please go do that.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So if you're on the email list, I will be sending out an email about the course on this coming.
So when this video gets released, it's basically Black Friday, November 24 is when I'll kind of mention the course and there'll be a page on scalingpostgrows.com kind of talking a little bit about it.
[00:35:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So make sure you sign up for that email list so you can stay up to date there.
But yeah, so continuing education, it's a thing that you do, which is why they call it continuing education. You do it throughout your entire career and the forms change a bit as you move along and the rate of intake changes a bit as you move along. But there's always stuff to learn. And one of the things that I would highly encourage senior devs to do, especially if you're feeling a little burnt out, is go watch some other people program or go watch some of these beginner level courses and just let your brain get back to basics and feel the passion again that you had when you started programming and really loved it. Right. If you watch the basics being taught, it kind of puts your brain back in that mode and then kind of gives you a charge up for a while.
[00:36:55] Speaker B: Sorry, go ahead.
[00:36:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And junior developers, I highly encourage you to seek out courses like this. And the other really good thing to do is to get involved in things like discords. Go. Rails has a really big discord. We have. Come join our discord, Duck Pond.
We talk in there. That's a great way to learn. It's just talking to other developers and asking questions and offering things that you think because we like to learn, too.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: So in terms of learning, I have another question about this. So what do you watch? Speed. Do you watch your videos at?
Let's make that a survey, people, in the comments, what you watch your videos at.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I've heard you tell me before that you kind of do the 1.5 or the 2.0.
[00:37:50] Speaker B: I'm about the 1.52.0. It goes a little bit too fast.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I never do that. I just don't.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:37:59] Speaker A: Because normally what I do is I'll watch a little bit of the video and then get up and pace around the house and think and absorb and gestate on that. And then I'll come back and watch a bit more of the video and do that again. So, like, a ten minute video takes me an hour to consume, but I'm really chugging along in there as I go, instead of consuming this and then.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: Cognitive, whatever I do afterwards.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
So I have a very particular way of consuming those videos.
But you're right, that is a really good thing. That I'd like to know is maybe I'll put a poll up on the Twitter X, whatever the hell it is now.
Not that anybody's on there anymore. Maybe I'll do it in the discord. But to find out what speed do you watch your videos on, your learning videos?
That's an interesting question.
[00:39:02] Speaker B: Yeah. The only reason I might go a little bit slower, a little bit faster. It depends on how fast the person is actually talking and how much the density of the information conveyed. Right. Because I do want to consume. It's not that I'm just. Everything's in a blaze and a blur.
[00:39:22] Speaker A: But yeah, my whole life is ablaze and a blur. I don't need my videos to be.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: Like that.
[00:39:31] Speaker A: But yeah.
As much as I hate to say it, I don't highly recommend books for language learning, concept learning. I think they're great reference type books.
I say put those on your shelf because it's good to step away from your electronic media every once in a while and just flip through a book. Flip through something tangible and real. And I've got to look up this problem. Let me look at my book, my patterns book or whatever.
Those are great.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: I'll say that I still buy books, and it's just finding the time to kind of go through them. I mean, you know, so it definitely peruse them. I mean, the thing about it is that it is easier to. Sometimes it's easier to scan a book than it is some to, what do they call it? Scrubbing when you go fast through.
Than to go through a scrubbed video.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: That is one advantage that they have.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: I do still have a lot of books, but they tend to be things like reference books, like the Gang of Four patterns book, or the project management books or theory books, things like that. Getting a book like on Ruby 1.9.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: Well, probably not your.
If someone wrote a book, I don't know if they would. But here's the thing.
You already have all that knowledge of Ruby. So all you need is a Ruby 3.3 addendum and you're good. Right.
Where if someone's new, if they had a full, comprehensive Ruby book.
[00:41:19] Speaker A: Well, right. But I guess what I'm saying is if you get something like, let's say that I got a book on Ruby 1.9. When Ruby 1.9 came out, it was new. I was learning. I got the book.
Well, to stay up to date, I have to keep buying the DLC.
[00:41:37] Speaker B: True.
[00:41:42] Speaker A: In those cases, I really don't see that as the best use of my money. I'd rather invest that in a video course on Ruby or reference books like what we talked about.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
And it goes back to kind of what I was saying before, is that the advantage? And this is kind of why I do scaling postgres as a video type thing, because you get the audio component, you get the visual component, dynamic, moving. Well, I don't move that much, but that just enhances the learning that's possible.
[00:42:24] Speaker A: Especially when you get to see people's faces and their expressions when they talk and make fun of how that goofy guy on the one side looks. And that kind of keeps you engaged.
But yeah, we'd love to hear your thoughts on continuing education. What do you do to help keep yourself engaged in learning?
Whether you're a junior developer or a senior developer or you've been doing this like me for 1000 years, how do you learn new stuff? What are your favorite methods? What keeps you engaged and excited about programming?
And most importantly, how fast do you watch your videos? Are you a 1.0 guy like me, or are you a 1.5 guy like Creston?
[00:43:14] Speaker B: We'd really like 0.5 because I think that's possible too.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Yes. There you go.
I've even seen some 2.0s.
It's a thing.
I don't understand how they get anything out of that, but it's a thing and my brain just don't work that fast.
Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed that.
I have a lot of fun doing these shows, so we're glad you're here. We're glad you're watching. Please let us know about any content that you would like to see in the comments below.
Also, please make sure you like and subscribe to this video. We do respond to the comments, so if you put something down there, ask a question, give a thought. We respond to those. We read every one of them.
So we do like to talk to you guys. This video will be going up soon. These are pre recorded now, but they go up the next day after I ship them off to Creston and he works his magic. We will have all the links for all the hot stuff down in the doobly do below the video so you can find all the links there. Don't forget to go check out scalingPostgres.com and sign up if you want to be kept up to date with those courses. You can also hang out with us on Twitter at Duckydev show, or you can come join our discord Duck pond and hang out with us there. I've usually got that up next to me while I'm working throughout the day, so you could probably ping me on there and get my attention most of the time.
So next week?
Yes, is Thursday.
No is Thanksgiving.
[00:44:53] Speaker B: Next Thursday is Thanksgiving and Thursday.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: I told you my brain doesn't work that fast. Next Thursday is Thanksgiving. So we won't be recording a show then, because we'll probably be actually, our families will probably be together having Thanksgiving dinner and celebrating our year and being thankful. So we will be back, I would assume, the next week with yet another surprise topic that we haven't decided on yet. But I promise you we'll talk about it next Thursday while we're eating turkey together.
So if you are a person that celebrates Thanksgiving, we wish you a very happy Thanksgiving and we will see you again in a couple of weeks. Until then, happy programming.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: Happy programming.
