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Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

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481–490 of 553 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#481

The single best thing I did for professional development was see a therapist. In tech, our jobs are knowledge-based. You can't hammer a nail into a board while you're sitting on the couch with your child, but you can certainly think about software architecture. I've found that my job bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa, and I believe it is far more common than most people realize. Stress piles up and it affe…

Disagree. I know not everyone is lucky to have close friends but as someone who has always dealt with things alone, I feel guilty and vulnerable the few times I've spoken to therapists. Even years later I regret going. I don't want someone who is impartial or non-judgmental. If I'm going to pay someone I want actionable advice from someone who has been in my shoes. Having friends who know me, who come from different…

Therapists don’t generally give advice.

Coaches do that.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#482

Harvard Business Review has a series of collected articles from their magazine composing the "Business Fundamentals Series". It is the most comprehensive, easy to read and condense guide you'll find for doing excellent yet difficult work of any kind anywhere.

Are you referring to this - https://store.hbr.org/product/mastering-business-fundamental...?

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#483

I was lucky enough to get paid for this but I'll say it anyway: learning to speak is the only thing of lasting value I have gotten out of startup accelerators. I would have gladly drop a few grand to acquire that skill. In fact, I'm considering hiring a speaking coach to improve. I've historically been a strong written communicator, but it turns out that speaking is very different from writing. In fact, I had thought…

I just watched this video and wanted to return to say thanks for the great suggestion. What an unexpectedly delightful lecture

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#484

I'm a big fan of pluralsight.com (no association). It's only $29 / month USD. I always go back to it when I want to brush up on something or learn something completely new. Not all videos / instructors are created equally of course, but their content has been the most consistent IMO.

The problem with Pluralsight is a lot of the courses are not that great.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#485
post #17

I'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).

And check your local library. Here in Seattle you get to use Safari if you have a library card.

Toronto too albeit the old version.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start with going through the settings [1]. You will learn some new things along the way. There's also a great WebStorm Guide [2], with many tips applicable to other languages as well. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/intellij-idea-settings/ [2] https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/guide/

Thanks, I'm wondering if there are more tutorials about writing plugins. There are a few shortcuts that do not exist and I'd love to implement with a plugin.

In 2014, I have written a just for fun plugin in about 2 hours (check out my write-up [1]). I've followed the "How to make an IntelliJ IDEA plugin in less than 30 minutes" [2] guide back then. Unfortunately, this guide seems to be outdated, but now there's an official guide [3].

[1] https://darekkay.com/blog/what-the-commit-plugin-for-intelli...

[2] https://www.cnblogs.com/meetrice/p/5184827.html

[3] https://jetbrains.org/intellij/sdk/docs/basics/getting_start...

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#487

The habit I’ve stuck with the longest, which continues to bear fruit: 1. If a book comes to mind, just buy it. No wishlists, no libraries. Feel free to get _both_ kindle and paperback, even the audible. The returns on this habit are incalculable. I do this at an extreme level, which amounts to about 5k / year. That’s similar to a great gym membership or owning a small car. Expensive but doable.

I do something similarish - if a book comes to mind, find it on “the internet” right away. Buy the physical book if I like the first chapter or two.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#488

The single best thing I did for professional development was see a therapist. In tech, our jobs are knowledge-based. You can't hammer a nail into a board while you're sitting on the couch with your child, but you can certainly think about software architecture. I've found that my job bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa, and I believe it is far more common than most people realize. Stress piles up and it affe…

Transparent plug but also sincere offer: I'm a psychotherapist. (I'm also a psychiatric researcher, which made me something of a data scientist, which is how I ended up on HN.) I work in private practice, dealing mainly with relationship and mood issues, and I've seen no small number of men and women in the kinds of fields that make up the HN readership over the course of my career - tech, STEM, etc.

It'll surprise no one to hear me say that I agree with locochef about investing in oneself through therapy^, but I also want to say that one of the most fascinating and simultaneously scary aspects of my work is seeing day in, day out the degree to which human beings excel at having stress pile up while ignoring it, denying it, believing themselves to somehow deserve it, "tough it out" to nearly-lethal degrees, or being kind of unaware of it entirely. A corollary of this observation is that the people (or the couples, or the families) who decide to see a therapist "early", when the challenge / problem / dilemma isn't yet at crisis level, are often the ones who benefit most. Like someone said down thread, it's like any other part of health: it costs less to not eat those cheeseburgers now than to have the bypass surgery later. Small investments made somewhat early can forestall a lot of ugly shit down the road. Frankly, if half the shit I help people with every day was taught universally in the fifth to tenth grades, I'd be out of a job (but happily so).

If anyone has general questions about therapy or related topics, I'm happy to answer if I'm able (or give you a nice "I have no idea" if I don't). Email in bio.

^ Sometimes! It's not for everyone, nor even for the same person at different times of their lives, and it can be harmful or end up being something you regret. But I agree in a general sense.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#489
post #181

As many others have said, books are the best things I've spent money on, but let me say more: Do books sometimes say things that are obvious? Yes. For example, when I first read Martin Fowler's book Refactoring, I had been renaming variables and moving methods from one class to another for years. But he gave a new framework for thinking about something that obvious. I've found the idea of separating out my coding flo…

I had the reaction when reading a preprint of Domain Driven Design. It was packed with ideas which were just coming into focus in my own mind after 10 years in the industry, but I didn't have names for them or have them systematized. It's a terrific feeling reading a well-written book like that and going 'Yes! Yes! Yes!'. (Since then, as with many things in our industry, it seems the book has been turned into a buzzw…

When I first read the DDD book almosty 15 years ago, I think it took me 2 or 3 reads to get it into my head. I really like the first half that can be used purely for a design perspective, and the second half for communicating with the business people to do business domain modelling .

Other books I really like are

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, it is a good read and lets you talk to a lot of UX'ers as I have found more than a few that have used this book for their thesis.

Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf, which is old but in world of streaming procesing a lot of the patterns can be reused.

The Site Reliability Engineering books or their free counter parts found on https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

edited to add a couple of newlines.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#490
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have gotten a lot of books via alibris.com (no affiliation, just a happy customer), a marketplace for used booksellers. I got a brand new $170 statistics textbook for about $35 because it was intended for another country; thinner paper and crappier binding, but the same book. I've also gotten used books that were indistinguishable from new books. Not as cheap as ebay, but an enormous selection with pretty reliable…

Tech books for the Indian market have been a good resource. The books (and maybe exercises) slightly differ to the US prints to keep control of the market. I acquired a huge stack from an Amazon UK seller for literally pennies each.

>>The books (and maybe exercises) slightly differ to the US prints to keep control of the market.

No.

They are mostly a little low quality books in terms of paper quality, photo graph color etc. Every thing else is the same.

I buy a lot of books as I stay in India. US publishers partner with local publishers and get it printed and sold for cheap.

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