What to learn

Today is the end of the 4 day long weekend. I have had a great Sunday so far, and I still have time today to quickly jot down something for a daily blog post.

I spend time with the WWCode Frontend technical track community as a Leadership Fellow. During the beginning of this year 2022, I started a bi-weekly series called "What to Learn" to share ideas to learn new topics.

I was very happy with the outcome and this experiment that took place in Q1 2022.

What to learn - summary

I published 6 articles in this series, 3 of which were contributed by the wwcode frontend community. My goal was this to be a community led series and with 2 people coming forward to write 3 posts was a big win for me and goal accomplised for this experiment.

Personally, I learned and wrote about Serverless and also built a slack integration (aka bot) to bookmark articles shared in wwcode's frontend slack which were then consolidated into a blog post to showcase community's learnings.

Writing consistently is not easy

I have had many failed attempts in the past to publish content regularly. Given this history I was very cautious with this bi-weekly series and wanted to make sure this is a limited edition (for Q1 2022 only) and not to overwhelm myself.

There were multiple times that I felt after the first month, i.e. after the first 2 posts in January, when I had to write in February I did not find the time, found 2 weeks was too short, and I had to push myself. This is where I encouraged folks from the community to write and was happy when 2 people expressed interest and wrote 3 posts.

I am on the 9th day of my daily writing spree. Fingers crossed that this becomes a daily habit!

How to find new topics to learn

In this post I have explained how to learn new topics or how not to give up on the learning.

While there is lot of advice on how to learn, the best way to learn new things is by doing.

During my time as a mentor for the MLH Fellowship, I met many interesting mentees. One of them was building a Github clone, i.e. his own version of Github and during my conversations with him I learned about monaco editor, the editor that powers VSCode!

This was a great example to find new topics to learn, i.e. identify topics from the daily things that we use.

I found this great resource to build your own version of x through my colleague during our 1:1.

How to find opensource projects to contribute

Similarly, if you want to contribute to opensource, the best way is to look for projects that you use on a daily basis.

For example, in the frontend world, look for Typescript's codebase, or even React or React Native's codebase.

Or eslint, babel, Jest, etc. All source code is there on Github and is a great way to look into the current issues on these projects and see if you can contribute or fix some good-first-bugs from these codebases.

If this is your first time contribution, then these are not recommended, it can be overwhelming. You can search for good first projects for first time opensource contributions and you can find a better list.