[Chicago] Ask ChiPy: How would you invest on building skills this year?

[Hector Rios]

The money really wouldn't help much. The only thing I'd use money for would
be for maybe internet access or a way to program (AWS account, Raspberry
Pi, or some server online with shell access).

Though books and courses are nice, like Loren, I learn by doing. Usually I
just come up with a project and plan it out on paper. Once defined on
paper, I research on basic ways to get that stuff done. This research is
mostly free online, or I would go to a meet-up such as ChiHackNight (they
have a Code clinic).

If I wanted to learn something new, I would join the ChiPy mentorship
program. ;)

If I wanted to *hone* and *grow* my existing skills, I would participate in
teaching others. I would use the $100 to buy food/refreshments/snacks for
the students.

Cheers,

{
    "name": "Hector Rios",
    "title": "polymath",
    "contact": {
            "linkedin": "hrios10",
            "gmail": "that.hector",
            "site": "http://hectron.github.io/"
    }
}

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 2:55 PM, Chris Foresman <foresmac at gmail.com> wrote:

> Vokal is very supportive of continued education, offering a $2,000 per
> year budget for each employee to spend attending conferences or taking
> online or offline classes. From my experience with that, $100 doesn’t get
> you very far. Either classes are free (meetups, etc) or exorbitantly
> expensive (e.g. AWS devops certification costs $2,000, Scrum master
> training is like $2,400, Beazly’s class is a couple grand, etc).
>
> I supposed I’d spend the $100 on a Raspberry Pi or similar setup and a
> handful of components to experiment with. I think that would get me the
> most bang for my buck.
>
>
>
> Chris Foresman
> chris at chrisforesman.com
>
>
>
> On Jan 20, 2016, at 12:47 PM, Loren Velasquez <lm.velasquez12 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I learn by doing so I would try to get an internship or something where I
> have a defined problem and try to work my way to fixing it. I think books
> are helpful but I would rather have something more hands-on. I would
> probably enroll in some courses and use the $100 that way.
>
> Best Regards,
> Loren
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Joshua Herman <zitterbewegung at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> If I have $100 to spend to improve myself I probably would invest in
>> buying books related to data science and machine learning. I actually
>> have done this. One of the books I bought is Python for Data Analysis:
>> Data Wrangling with Pandas,
>> NumPy, and IPython
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 7:56 AM, Randy Baxley <randy7771026 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Get involved with http://freegeekchicago.org/ and there SC3 hackers
>> either
>> > in person or on github, visit http://pumpingstationone.org/,
>> > http://chihacknight.org/ and http://www.blue1647.com/.
>> >
>> > Consider the holes between fun coding and productive coding in my own
>> path:
>> >
>> > http://randy7771026.wix.com/codepath
>> >
>> > which I think are finding an IDE/coding environment that suits me and
>> > considering https://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses though
>> you
>> > will quickly blow that c note.
>> >
>> > On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 7:23 AM, Tathagata Dasgupta <
>> tathagatadg at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Hello ChiPy,
>> >> When I see the mentees on stage showcasing their newly acquired skills
>> -
>> >> it makes me extremely happy and proud. And a bit jealous!
>> >>
>> >> Learning new skills is critical for software developers to be relevant
>> in
>> >> this fast moving land of technology.
>> >>
>> >> Say you have 100 dollars earmarked to become a better developer this
>> year.
>> >> How would you spend it - what would you want to learn, which books
>> would
>> >> you buy, any courses that you would take?
>> >>
>> >> How do you adjust your schedule to make room for picking up the new
>> skill?
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> Cheers,
>> >> T
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> Chicago mailing list
>> >> Chicago at python.org
>> >> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>
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