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Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

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Re: Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

#81
post #12

At first, it will be hard. You may not have any spare time. After the newborn phase, the amount of spare time you have will slowly start to go back up again. Enjoy it, they aren't little babies for long. You will be well aware of how precious that time is, in a way that your pre-parent self could not comprehend. I usually have about 4-5 hours of time after the kids go to bed. During this time I either program, talk w…

At first, it will be hard. You may not have any spare time. After the newborn phase, the amount of spare time you have will slowly start to go back up again.

Interesting... My experience has been the opposite, the first ~6 months they sleep so much that there is plenty of time to do things. Then you get a phase where they start to crawl and then walk around. In that phase, you have to be attentive all the time to ensure that they don't harm themselves or break stuff :). That really changed when our daughter was ~2, when she knew what she can and cannot do and they can basically play more by themselves. She is now ~3, sometimes she plays alone (she likes Duplo) and sometimes we play together. Since she usually goes to bed at 19:00 and is a good sleeper, we usually have a couple of hours every night for ourselves.

What I learned: your time does get reduced drastically, but you spend the remaining time with more focus/direction. Also, you use your time smarter. E.g., I used to do sports (indoor climbing), but now I just cycle every day from/to work (~1 hour) to stay fit. It takes approximately the same time as going by train or car.

Re: Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

#82
Though I've gotten better about making due with shorter stretches of time, I eventually realized how important it was for me to have a least some in-depth study time. My wife is the same. Our deal is that we take turns and each get ~2 hours on the weekend to go away alone to a coffeeshop or wherever for... whatever. It's nice, feels like an eternity, but ultimately isn't too much time away.

Re: Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

#83
Assuming you have sleep, I found it easier to learn theory and read things than code. Coding requires longer uninterrupted time, which was hard to get. Learning from articles not so much - you can do it on playground while they play, you can read paragraph or think about problem while you watch them at home. Writing text turned out to be similar - it is easily possible with interruptions.

I guess the trick is not to fall down into a trap of thinking that kids needs you super active all the time. They don't, they are fully competent to play without you, for short times at first only and they will break your focus every few minutes or so. Give them your attention, but simply dont give up on reading/writing/etc and you will find the balance.

Re: Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

#86
First and foremost, screw the green boxes on GitHub. They don't mean shit.

Second of all, there are many ways to "skill up" and that doesn't always mean creating open source side projects or experimenting with the newest fad.

After becoming a father I found I certainly had a lot less time but it forced me to cut out everything that didn't matter. That included watching tech talks, working on a bunch of small projects, getting my "commit a day" on GitHub, reading a large number of books, and so on.

Instead, I decided what I needed and wanted was financial freedom and I wanted to achieve that by building my own software business(es).

I stopped measuring myself by silly graphs or what others in the industry may or may not think of me. I stopped second guessing myself and I stopped worrying about my "marketability" or "maintaining skills" for hireability's sake.

Why worry about skills, marketable or keeping up with the fads if I work for myself? As long as I'm true to myself and I can build kickass products, I don't care about anything else.

Since then, I've built my own successful business and I am currently working on the second (second baby and second business!).

Re: Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

#87
The most important thing is organization, after that is time management and finally typing speed.

Do everything you can to keep as close to 100% of your time focused on your main role (automate and/or delegate all secondary tasks). Remember every distraction costs maybe 10 minutes to get back "in the zone".

It's hard but definitely possible, have heart I have 3 kids under 5 and I think I'm doing pretty good. One last piece of advice, financial stress sucks (doubly so with children) so try to have some savings for when unexpected expenses come up as these sorts of circumstances can affect your performance directly.

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