I'm a software engineer with a budget for professional development, I'm looking for a good way to spend it.
I'm curious what other people have found valuable, it could be a book, MOOC, conference etc
Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
1–10 of 553 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#2Harvard 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#3Interestingly most things of value I have learned came from free content (Twitter/Articles/RandomGitHubRepos) especially ones that are open source. I guess the fact that community can build up on the content is super valuable.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#4I'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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#5Udi Dahan's "Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design" course.
At one point, I was considering paying out of pocket to attend the course. Fortunately, the company I was working for at the time wanted to send people to it and I got selected.
After taking the course, even if I did have to pay myself, I wouldn't have been upset.
That course is outstanding.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#6Going through dataquest.io has been super rewarding. Backfilled a lot of forgotten stats and probability knowledge, math, learned data science python, good sql practice and now going through different ML techniques. Totally worth it if you want to do data stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#7I've found project management qualifications to give the best ROI. I've done Prince 2 and Scrum. Although I've never had a job title of Project Manager or Scrum Master, they've helped me get senior/lead developer jobs just because recruiters like to see those words on a CV.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#8Udi Dahan's "Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design" course. https://particular.net/adsd At one point, I was considering paying out of pocket to attend the course. Fortunately, the company I was working for at the time wanted to send people to it and I got selected. After taking the course, even if I did have to pay myself, I wouldn't have been upset. That course is outstanding.
Congratulations on your first HN post.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#9Destroy All Software screencasts by Gary Bernhardt has some great content. Besides the typical CS degree, I felt that these videos were most pivotal in me writing better code.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#10For me it has been paying for folks to help pair code with new languages I'm learning has been amazing at speeding up / getting some nuance quickly. Latest language was Rust.
Second, books.