While preparing for my new life and business in a new place, which is in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, since November 2020, I used a lot of time to learn new things.
Since 2015, when I started working on iOS app development, I’ve focused on iOS/Swift things and haven’t spent much time learning outside of the iOS/Swift world. This was a strategic choice and I learned a lot by exploring Swift.
However, I felt the time has come to learn outside of iOS/Swift, to have broader and deeper knowledge about software development.
This is a simple list of things I’ve learned in these 5 months. I’m writing this primarily as a footprint of my career. However, it would be my pleasure if this gives some hints to developers who are ambitious to learn more.
Things I’ve learned
Programming languages
- Haskell
(Still reading)
- Rust
- Scala
- Languages themselves
(It seems functional programming principles are a part of the current trend of programming language features.)
- Category Theory: The theory behind Haskell
- LLVM: Compiler infrastructure that supports lots of languages including Swift, Rust, Haskell, etc
One of my favorite lectures at my university was a workshop to make a C compiler by ourselves. Learning LLVM reminded me of the workshop.
- Javascript Engine: “How does a web browser work?”
- Elm: a functional language for declarative UI
Elm community looks nice as well!
Developers’ habit
As I like pair-programming and scrum workflow, I wanted to learn the origin of them.
Catch up on new swift usages
- SwiftUI Tutorials
- SwiftUI for iOS 14 from Design+Code
- Getting started with Swift on AWS Lambda
While doing this tutorial, I used Docker for the first time.
Server-side
- Docker
Docker seems so interesting to me…
- Updated my Server (Ubuntu)
Attend conferences
- MobileOptimized 2020
- GitHub Universe Virtual 2020
Great conference. I learned a lot about OSS culture.
- VS Code Day 2021
- Community.o (by LLVM Foundation)
This was a relatively small, but dense conference. I got more interested in compiler technologies and their community.
- Mozilla Festival 2021
Mozilla Festival was wonderful for people like me interested in interdisciplinary things, such as society, ethics, digital city, culture, art, and technology.
Career and software community
- Open Source Software culture
- Burnout (which seems quite common among software devs)
Very encouraging post.
- Internet culture
A book about prochronism and the internet culture. It’s about how to save or express processes of digital content creation.
Freelance business
- Dutch business rules
- Financial stuff (bank, tax, accountant, …)
- Make resume and portfolio
- Update equipment (monitor, webcam, …)
Life improvement
- English study (business vocabulary, business writing, academic vocabulary, …)
- Explore Amsterdam and Dutch culture
- Learn Dutch
Retrospectives
- I really felt that a programmer constantly needs time to catch up with new things. Especially it’s important to know what’s happening outside of one’s primary tech stack. “20% rule ” like in Google seems to make sense in this point. As I became a freelancer, I hope I can gain control over the time I use.
- My interest in programming languages has become stronger. I want to learn more about Haskell because it’s so interesting to learn. I want to catch up with Rust because it seems promising. Learning more about LLVM feels interesting as well to know how languages work.
- I wanna keep my eyes on social things: open-source culture, areas between society and technology, and technology-art. Even though I’m not sure what I can do, it might be good for me to invest a little bit more time in this area considering my interests and background, which is interdisciplinary information studies which I studied at university. At least it was very encouraging for me to know people with similar interests and struggles when I attended Mozilla Festival.
Thank you very much for reading! If you want to follow my activities, please follow my Twitter @yoshikuni_kato as I occasionally tweet my interests.
