Making Badass Developers - Kathy Sierra (Serious Pony) keynote

Kathy Sierra gave an informative talk on the topic of learning at the 2015 O'Reilly Fluent conference. It's entitled "Making Badass Developers". [VIDEO]

I'm skeptical about willpower, too.. but what about "cognitive resources"? I bookmarked this because while I don't know if it's the whole and full truth (how could it be?), it certainly seems interesting, the whole talk is but here's the start of the relevant bit: [VIDEO]

1. You need to recognize when you're not learning, for one thing. If it's easy, you're not learning. You need to push yourself into the zone of discomfort, where you feel clumsy and have a hard time. Now you're learning. 2. Find a mentor. Lacking that, find e.g. talk of someone explaining some hard techniques and then try to follow the advice. Even and especially if it feels clumsy at first. (More on those two here: [LINK] ). 3. Switch to a new job where you'll be exposed to new things. try to find a job where people do code review, feedback is how we learn faster. 4. Learn how to learn: [VIDEO] 5. Reflect on your mistakes, try to find what cues you missed and what you should look for next time. I've been doing this on weekly basis (you can read the results at [LINK] ) and I've learned a huge amount from figuring out underlying cause of what I did wrong.