Buying Bitcoin.
Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
31–40 of 553 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#32A subscription to O'Reilly's digital library https://learning.oreilly.com
Not sure why you'd get flagged for that, you don't seem to have an association?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#33I'll say books period. Every month I buy them, every month I read them, and I let the topics sort themselves out.
You can get them for free at the library. No need to spend professional development money on them.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#34Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#35I've enjoyed having an O'Reilly Safari subscription for random access to books. In particular, the Pragmatic Programmer and Designing Data-Intensive Applications. I've also had good experiences with SCPD courses from Stanford, if your budget would cover those (they are at the other end of the price spectrum).
For anyone in India, the cheapest way to get a Safari Books subscription is via an ACM Professional or Student membership. It’s only INR 1500 per year.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#36If you aren’t great with your toolset spending time learning your editor/ide .
I spent some time a decade ago learning better emacs skills (macros on the fly). Also getting better with jet brains IDEs. Made me more productive and my work more enjoyable.
I also read some of the “Unix power tools” book from oreilly, to help my command line skills.
Thirdly I had to learn symfony so I signed up for symfonycasts video tutorials and did the first lessons. It was a little cheeky but it really helped getting running. I liked the short lessons followed by actually doing.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#37O’Reilly has a subscription that gives access to all of their books. Incredible amount of value over countless topics.
$49/mo isn't cheap though, you can buy an awful lot of books for that money directly.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#38I found that (for me !) it was less useful to invest in learning to do new things, as opposed to investing in being more efficient and / or having my work time more pleasant. Make your work feel like pleasure and there is no limit to what you can achieve. So maybe don't only think "what can I be better at ?" but also "how can my life be better while I work ?". Software: A proper training session with a high level deb…
Unless you buy a cheap brand I don't think the matte / glossy holds up anymore. A good quality screen can have a degree of gloss and still offer superior quality to matte. Crystal clear rendering of fonts is a given. Having said the above, I think there's actually very little competition out there that beats MacBook Pro's etc.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#39A course about management and organisational development that used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychodrama methods. Self-awareness and people skills are invaluable in software development.
Other than that: rocking-kneeling chair from Varier.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#40I don't think there's been any better value for me than Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software. I randomly stumbled upon it way back in 2014 when I had just learned my first programming language and was dabbling in Ruby, watched everything, and it made me much better at my job. It was $29/m at the time.
Apart from that, I think maybe one or two books every year. Most of them are pretty poor, but the value of that odd book that totally changes how you think about certain things is pretty high. A lot of technical books also have _really_ good, practical advice that can be applied to day-to-day work if you want to read them. It's pretty valuable to know the technologies you're working with in some depth.