Recently I have been trying to learn things on my own - as in, not following the formal education path - which is to pay for a online course and attend it

But in the journey I noticed quite some free online structured courses and also other ways to learn things, all for free. Paying for learning something is something I consider a bit overrated, but yeah, I do agree that there are quite some good paid content online and offline - paid online courses, paid offline courses, paid online and offline books etc

Notice how I said “trying to learn things on my own”. It’s a bit of a funny thing, because many people say this and also use the term “self-taught”. I think what they usually mean is - not have someone physically present near them to teach them, and they also probably didn’t pay or maybe paid to learn something

I surely learned a ton from others and still am learning from others. Below are some of the cliche things that I have been following that I wanted to jot down

Blog posts, articles

There are a ton of good online blog posts and articles. Some might look for the best for the fear of learning something wrong, or not learning something well because the content wasn’t great etc. I usually just dive in and figure out if I can make things out from the content or if all of it just goes over my head, lol. I have usually found people saying that - it’s good to just start with what’s good instead of looking for the “best resources and materials” etc though that’s a good thing too, just that it’s a quest by itself and you will spend more time searching for content than actually learning then ;) and I have been there and done that :P where I simply noted down URLs for lot of content but didn’t learn from them. So…just dive in ;) and use what’s good enough, which usually appears on the top of the search engine results :)

I recently used a blog post to understand how to get started with distributed systems. It helped me with a decent start!

Books

Surely ebooks and books are great resources. Sometimes I have also seen people overrate it 😅 I have noticed that books sometimes bore me etc. Recently I didn’t read any books to learn technical stuff, just fiction books. But I know many colleagues who highly recommend some books. I do have some books that I paid for or got for free from the websites of publishers, actually it wasn’t free, I had to pay them with my details like name, email, employer name, job title etc to get a free ebook or free excerpt of ebook from the publisher’s / owner’s website

I haven’t read any of those books yet though 😆 But I think I’ll read them some day. Very soon ;)

Courses

Initially I mentioned I was trying to avoid formal education paths. But hey, I realized that when I was learning things on my own - I had to figure out a path to learn the stuff I want to learn. Like, people learn 1st grade stuff before learning 2nd grade stuff. It’s easier that way, going step by step. But one needs to know the steps to do that 😅 And that’s where courses came in handy I guess. I preferred some simple courses online, like Redis University, CockroachDB University, which are all free. Unlike college courses, which are usually paid and are usually physical, but sometimes online. I also happened to notice many free College courses online, on Coursera, YouTube etc, where the course creators, or the universities had posted their content. I did signup for one actually, yet to finish it though. But it’s pretty cool - the coursera course I signed up for mentioned that I can go through the entire course for free and need to pay only if I want a certificate from the university. I guess it’s a fair thing

Videos

This is kind of like courses. There are lot of YouTube videos online from where you can learn tons of stuff. YouTube playlists, channels. Not to mention there could be other video platforms too which host rich video content to teach stuff. It’s just that I haven’t used much of others

I did notice people using Twitch streaming service to stream their videos realtime, with / without recording, to teach people stuff or talk about stuff etc

Research papers

This is a really cool way to learn stuff! There are tons of research papers out there, many free, some behind paywalls, that you can read and learn a ton of things. Especially the latest and greatest developments in a field - all resides in research labs in the world and are published research papers.

In the software world, the domain I work in, research papers are pretty popular here too. There are a lot of folks and companies doing research and publishing their research papers, and sharing their knowledge with the world

Documentation / Manuals

I have learned quite a lot from documentation / manuals. Especially for tech stuff, this is pretty common. I don’t know how it works in other fields of work, but in technology / software, lots of software have documentation and give a very good and detailed view about the software and how it works, it’s internals etc

Podcasts

This is a recent buzz word. Lot of people are into podcast, or the old word being radio, I guess? Probably not a buzz word :P if it’s just a synonym for radio :P Anyways, so, there are lot of podcasts now a days. This is similar to the rise of people posting videos online on YouTube etc, there are also content creators in other plaforms including podcasts. There’s some great content out there in podcasts. I have listened to a few and liked some of them. I usually end up reading transcripts though :P than listening to the podcast, but unfortunately not all of them have proper transcripts

Forums

This is something I learned from a colleague long ago. He mentioned he became an expert in a topic by just answering questions online, on StackOverflow, which is a popular forum for Q&A in the software industry

I think forums are a great way to mingle and learn from others, be it offline or online forums. You can listen to discussions, answer questions, ask questions, learn a lot in the process. There’s a lot of things that you can learn by just helping the community. And it’s a win-win - you learn from the community in the process, while trying to help them and the community learns or gets help from you because you helped them!

Practice / Doing

Practice maketh man perfect, huh? :P I think practicing or doing something over and over again is going to make you a pretty good doer, than just a thinker ;) This could probably be applied to many fields of work. I do software stuff, so my “doing” is usually learn software stuff, read code, write code, so let’s talk a bit about that

Software world - Developers - Reading and Writing code

I’m a developer in the software world. In this domain, a lot of things change on a daily basis, on an hourly basis too :P Every moment someone or something is trying to disrupt another thing or another person I guess. Innovate and what not.

Usually a common advice I have heard from software developers is that - when one reads and writes a lot of code, they get better at reading and writing code. Not very surprising huh? Nothing cool, nothing englightening, nothing new. I mean, it’s simply saying - “do it a lot of times and you will get better at it”, that’s it 🤷

So, yeah, that’s what I try to do - I read a lot - code, documentation. I also try to write lot of code, within and outside the job. This gives me enough practice to learn new things, experience new things - be it something cool, or something as simple as an experience - where I learn what Not to do, so that things are better :)

Conclusion

So those were some of the ways that I had in my mind, for learning something. Of course there could be more. It’s always good to find more ways to learn something when you really want to learn it, because, well, the aim is to learn it, doesn’t matter how you learn it :) Just focus on “How do I learn this thing? What more can I do?” and keep thinking about that and you will find answers sooner or later and keep learning and improving and growing, in any area you want to get better :)