Yeah, that’s pretty much it when you try to find topic to speak about. Especially when you try to find it by yourself. But hey, you’re not lonely island. It’s ok to snag an idea or two from someone’s else blog. That’s because you’ll use different point of view on the topic. It’s called inspiration. And that’s how i came up with this subject that i’ll try to push to few places.
Thoughts of inexerienced person about experience
This came to me after reading some blog posts:
- about pet projects which gave me direction to think about gaining experience
- inspire and get inspired that gave me some courage to search for conferences with CFP
- why you should speak at meetups andconferences that actually forced me to send those submissions
Questions that started going back and forth my mind are not so trivial:
- what’s wrong with ‘xyz years of experience in …’ that is seen in job offers
- why (sometimes) ‘5 years of experience’ is not what it sounds like
- when do you really get experience
- can you ‘store’ experience and how to do it
… and so on and so forth. You can multiple this kind of questions.
Where it comes from
In my opinion definitely not from your day job. Dayjob is outcome of your experience, i’ll talk about it later. The real source is passion and fun. If you’re passionate about something you’re eager to learn about it, play with it and gather information. I can bet on that there were numerous situations that you would rather search for information about new library that you found than spend time on tasks that are boring to you.
There is (at least in my opinion) big difference between ‘i need to know’ and ‘i want to know’. Let’s give an simple example: kids. They way more prefer to play their favourite game (digital or manual) or even watch that someone’s plays it over doing boring homework. Of course there are exceptions that just enjoy school activities. Same is with you and me and everyone else. We are like kids. And this won’t change.
What about dayjob? It’s not so much source of experience. It’s about that difference between ‘you need to’ and ‘you want to’. It’s different kind of traction that pushes you forward. Sometimes direction that you’re going is not what you want. Fun goes away and more and more distractions shows up. But still everything that you learn in this way is not useless. It’s like this thing with a car. You can choose car that gives you most fun but beside it looks cool it’s unpractical. On the other hand You can choose a car that handles your family the best.
If we’re in topic of dayjob what’s about that ‘years experience is not what it looks like’? Let’s say there is this project which is finished. Money goes from hand to hand. Everybody is happy and project goes to maintenance mode. For sake of argument you’re going to maintain it and it goes for like 3 years. There are some minor issues and bugs and you fix them. New releases with bugfixes are published around each quarter of year. So do you have 3 years of experience from this project? In my opinion nope. There is no new things that you could learn in there. Everything is already set up in ‘do not even dare touch anything’ state. Probably in first year of maintenance you problably automated most of tasks to state of ‘fire and forget’. So again, does it brings any major knowledge?
The experience source
Now you might wonder ‘ok then, where you learn the most?’. I’ll be clever and answer ‘it depends’ :) It depends what you want to learn. You can ask boss to move you to new project which is more research than development. If the answer to this is no then you can change company because your current one doesn’t give a damn about developers. You can try to pair programing or mentor newcomers in company. After hours you can build wonder-application-that-everyones-needs aka pet project. Or you can contribute to existing libraries and frameworks. Possibilities are limitless.
Just one note about pet projects. Please do not put them in a drawer. Make them real. Make them public. Let them shine. I (and everyone else who is doung so) can tell that there is going to be something interesting and really nice out of them. Just give them a try. As a example i can give you my person. I started this project called YAMEM and at some strange coincidence i get in touch with @mihcall. And now i’ve got enough courage to try to speak at conference about topic that you right now read about. At this point i want to say to both of them @polyconf and @oredev and hope they won’t reject my submission :D
The experience store
Is it even possible to store experience somehow? Yes but not in the strict way :) If we agree that giving someones an advice is storing own experience then yes. Just share your knowledge. You can do this in numerous ways. Start a blog. Write an article. Record podcast or videocast. Go to conference, meetup or user group and speak. Actually you can do anything and everything that you will do will benefit in future. And for the most you’ll grow your skills and experience by meeting new people, sharing ideas, starting new projects together. Or even go to conference and speak about what you have done.