This year I really want to focus on my own personal and professional growth. I’ve always said that as soon as you feel comfortable in your professional life, you stop growing and its time to do/learn something more. My good friend and life coach/professional mentor, Jide, taught me that in your professional life, its all about the value you bring to the table. If you ever stop increasing your value, you’re only harming yourself and someone else is working longer, harder, more efficiently than you are.
These are the people who will ultimately be successful, and you’ll wonder ‘why don’t I have that?’.Over the last 3 years, I’ve come to realize how absolutely true that statement is.
Below is a list of things that I want to do this year. These aren’t New Year’s Resolutions, because everyone makes those and then forgets about them. I want to do everything on this list for the betterment of myself, my future, and for the sake of always learning something new.
My goals for 2016 are:
- Make a website to force myself to document my work/life
- Learn Python, Java, and whatever else seems like a natural progression.
- Beef up my Github and contribute to open source projects
- Put a hardware project on Kickstarter
- Attend a Hack-a-thon
- Get back into shape
- Vlog
- Travel!
- Be an all around better person
To address most of the above, I’ve pretty much submersed myself in MOOCs through:
In my opinion, Udemy is the worst of the three. Most of their courses are not free, and the special bundles that they have are often for courses that are several years old containing outdated content with lots of deprecated functions and syntax. I appreciate the quality and quantity of their courses, but I’m not about dropping $50+ on something I can find on Google for free.
I’m currently taking a CompSci course from MIT and a power electronics series from University of Colorado on edx that are both really great, and are available for free. The courses I’m taking all have video lectures complete with subtitles, homework/quizzes/tests, discussion boards, progress page with all of your grades, and direct lines of communication to TAs if you ever need/want help.
The more and more I learn about software, the more interested I am in it. Being able to immediately see the results of your work, unlike hardware design, is very satisfying. I intend on keeping up with my MOOC courses to learn more about software engineering and fun challenge sites like HackerRank. Who knows, maybe even end up with a software position sometime in the future.
If you’re interested in learning about pretty much whatever you can think of, head over there and give them a look.