How not to drown in a sea of ​​technologies and approaches: the experience of 50 experts

Gathering Information: Look Where You've Got

There are always many projects around to learn from. Some are completely new, where young people uncertainly feel fresh instruments. Others are already 5, 10, 15 years old, they are overgrown with technological growth rings, which can be used to study the trends of the Mesozoic era.
This should definitely be used and regularly set aside an hour or two for probing related projects. If something is not clear, go to a local guru and learn. It is imperative to find out what architectural decisions were made and why.

If you read alternative approaches in a book, you need to find out if they have tried them. It may turn out that you will push colleagues to cool ideas. Or maybe they will save a lot of time sorting through new, advertised silver bullets.

On the one hand, you reveal knowledge gaps to your colleagues. On the other hand, you gain invaluable experience for the future. The second, in my opinion, outweighs the first.

Gathering Information: See where others are

In order to find new trends, you should study news feeds, forums and podcasts. Right on the way to work, nothing to do yet. Often in the description you can find the materials used and useful literature, as well as the social networks of cool professionals. You can chat with them or at least track the articles and literature that they post. Moreover, sensible ideas may appear, which obviously no one in the podcast voiced, but well highlighted the direction where to dig further. Links to good sources can be found at the end of this article.

It is worth putting down roots, setting up networks and keeping in touch with colleagues from previous places of work / study. During a friendly conversation, you will learn from each other new approaches, reviews about companies, technologies, and more.

I was told here that it is banal, but not everyone knows how it is done. Come on, right now you will break away from work, remember the familiar techies and score appointments / tasks in your calendar. You can call five pros to the bar once every couple of weeks. If communication is difficult for you, then at least call / write. In addition to football, political science and philosophy, you can ask questions such as:

• “What kind of pilots do you have running in the company?”
• “did you face these problems: <voicing your problems>?”
• “What new things did you try out on the project?”
• What are you reading/testing/promoting?

This will be enough to get you started.
Even better, at least once a month, at least with one eye, look there, beyond the horizon. Where overseas companies master new technologies without you. The easiest way to monitor foreign vacancies on various sites. In the "requirements" section, you can notice a couple of unfamiliar words. It is rare that untested technologies are written in the requirements, so they are definitely good in some way. Worth exploring!

Checking the Information: Find the Pioneers

When enough new tasty technologies have accumulated, you should find top Western firms that use all the innovations that you have heard and read about. If possible, go and see their code, articles, blogs. If not, then immediately go to them for an interview to try out everything that happens: architecture, how everything works and why, what kind of rake they stepped on until they came to this. Fakapy - our everything! Especially strangers.

Verification of information: do not trust the pioneers

Catching up on other people's failures ahead of time is much cheaper than stumbling upon common mistakes yourself. As testers and House, MD say: "Everyone lies." Don't trust anyone (technically). It is necessary to look critically at any book, not to agree with the ideas, whatever the arguments, but to think and map on your world, environment, country, criminal code.

In all sources, conferences, books and other things, they always write how cool and breakthrough they are, scatter slogans. And in order not to stumble over the "survivor's mistake", you should google other people's files: "why git is shit", "why cucumber is a bad idea".

This is the easiest way to get rid of slogans, “blind faith” and start thinking critically. To see that vaunted and popular techniques can bring pain and destruction in practice. Ask yourself the question: “What exactly would make me doubt the effectiveness of this new <…>?”. If the answer is “nothing”, then you are a believer, mate.

Tutorial: grow your base

Now that you have returned from the interview, smeared with new information, you can calm down, return to a quiet and comfortable lair, hug your tester, kiss the manager, give the developer a high five and tell about wondrous worlds and unknown beasts.
And now how to quickly learn something new? The answer is no. Thanks to everybody, you're free.
From a few read articles in the solutions there will be a bunch of crutches due to the presence of basic pitfalls in any area. Therefore, the first step is to study the theoretical base. Usually this is the top book that I could find + official documentation. As you understand, in our field a book of 1000 pages is far from uncommon. And meaningful reading of technical literature from cover to cover takes more time than fiction. Here you can not rush and it is better to practice slow reading. One fully read top book eliminates questions in this area, demonstrates the basic processes and rules of work. Only getting a good base gives the full picture.
You should find from various sources (or as a result of our past "intelligence activities") a list of best practices, worst practices and cases where this technology does not work at all.
Before moving on to the next step, you should choose the tools for working with the new technology. It is better to immediately subscribe to the blogs of the services you use, changelogs, and test out integrations with other services. In instrumental blogs, in addition to changelogs, where you can read innovations in a compressed form and immediately figure out how to use these innovations in your project, there is also news related to the ecosystem as a whole. For example, about integrations with other services. Thus, by tracking the main tools, you also get relevant information about related areas.

Training: try it out in practice

Now we are gaining the most valuable thing - practice. It is necessary to build new knowledge into everyday work and personal tasks, to develop a habit. Usually after that it is already possible to build good solutions.

It is better to structure new knowledge and try everything on a working project together with the team. If it is not possible to apply new knowledge within the framework of current tasks, you can get by with a pet project to consolidate the material.

By the way, keeping a home project is a must. This is the best way to get practice on learning technologies without lengthy stack approvals on a combat project. Independently design architecture, do not forget about performance, develop, test, devops, analyze, decompose, intelligently choose tools. All this helps to look at the benefits of technology from all sides, at all stages (except for implementation, I guess). And the skills will always be in good shape, even if you have been doing only one type of task for two sprints.

Training: go and disgrace yourself

Pokodil? Well done! But that is not all. You can praise yourself all you want, but your eyes are blurred by too much contribution to the development of this solution (remember the psychology of testing). I learned - tell / show to another and you will immediately see your gaps. The number of reviewers depends on your courage and sociability. When one of our colleagues has made a breakthrough and done something difficult, we get together as a team, call anyone interested and rummage through knowledge. Over the course of the year, this practice worked well. Or you can sign up for QA or DEV meetups and share it with an even wider audience. If it really came out good, it can be suggested to be used in all teams.

Training: repeat

Don't know where to find the time? Do you like continuous processes, disciplines and time management? I have them!

Every morning, while you are fresh and full of energy, you need to devote 1-2 pomodoros to learning something new in your development plan. You put on your ears. You put TomatoTimer on the right screen so that no one distracts (it really works!). And you take a list of your study tasks. This could be a basic book, taking an online course, or developing a pet project to gain practice. You don’t hear or see anyone, you work according to plan and don’t hang around for half a day, because the timer will return you to the mortal world. The main thing is not to check the mail before this ritual. And turn off notifications for the time being. Otherwise, the routine attacks and you will be lost to society for 8 hours.

Set aside 1 pomodoro each night before bed for autopilot training or memories/nostalgia. These can be tasks in the style of “kata” (we train powerful coder reflexes without disturbing the tired mind), analysis of algorithms, re-reading of forgotten books / articles / abstracts.
This is quite enough. But if you're a cheater with no kids waiting at home, you might as well take a chance and try out the most fanatical devopser's training mode I've ever seen. 2-3 hours after work and one day off at the office. For one weekend, according to the author of the technique, pumping is equal to a week (!) Picking in the evenings because of a fresh head and silence in the office.

Become a Jedi

The time has come. Now you have endless meetings on your calendar, hundreds of promises and agreements that you mark in a notebook in the margins or on leaves that have already covered your table in three layers. Mountains of unexpected commitments come and go. A reputation for gouging and forgetting begins to take shape.

In order to somehow make life easier for yourself in a new role, you should read how others cope with it. It is better to do this in advance, because then it will be much more difficult to implement an “empty inbox”. I, at one time, spent 10 hours on this. I think it would be most convenient to look at this video on youtube.

Switch speeds

You should continue with materials that allow you to accelerate the speed of reading and memorization, because every day a sea of ​​​​letters, presentations falls, you need to read non-technical literature for development.

Most management books carry only a few basic ideas. But these ideas are accompanied by a long introduction, stories about how the author came to this, self-promotion, motivation. You need to quickly fish out these thoughts, check whether it is true, whether it is valuable to you, fix it and return to it in order to build it into your life. It needs to be applied. Don't chase quantity. The focus should be on quality and the translation of knowledge into skills exactly where you are currently working. And tools and everything else always appear exactly for the task and remain in your arsenal only after their practical use. It is impossible to read / see and hear enough for the future.

Put a fuse

We all know how difficult it is to break away from your favorite work, whatever it is. You may not even notice how constant fatigue appeared, family, friends and joy in life disappeared. You should at least once a quantum take tests for "burnout". I think that it will be much more useful to get acquainted with the materials of colleagues from Stratoplan. I want to note that they have a lot of useful things besides this.

The manager is forced to participate in dozens of negotiations, answer hundreds of letters, receive thousands of notifications. The information that we receive in a day fills our heads and, at times, makes it difficult to think in “opportunities” rather than “putting out fires.” You have to be quiet. Without music / series / phone. At this moment, all the information is sorted out, the turnover falls asleep, and you begin to hear yourself. Some colleagues use meditation, jogging, yoga, cycling for this.

Back to the Future

You need to expand the scope if you have become at least a team leader. Look at least 3 months ahead and back. Moreover, now even more depends on your decisions, and the results can appear only in six months. However, the routine has not disappeared. And behind this routine, you may not see the bomb on which the team or the entire project sits.

If we analyze what was in the news reports today, yesterday, the day before yesterday, there will be solid white noise. But if you work with the zoom and look at the news with larger strokes, the activities of certain parties will be monitored. And if you take a history textbook, then it is generally obvious what happened and what should have been done (the winners write history?).

So far, I am not a top manager, so I chose weekly iterations for myself. Every evening after work I write down all non-standard situations, events, news, meetings and decisions for today. It takes about 5 minutes, because I write down everything in thesis. At the end of the week I spend another half an hour rereading (instead of the evening study tomato), formulate more concisely and try to find patterns, results of my behavior and past decisions. I beat myself on the hands, I become a little better, I learn to avert trouble from the team, project, company, and go to bed in a good mood.

In addition, you will always have something to say at the next retrospective. If you wish, you can even draw the timeline of the project yourself, because some people don’t forget anything now.

This is not a diary, but an unemotional log. You look at dry facts, you see absurdity, wrong decisions, manipulations, you look at yourself from the outside. You draw conclusions on how best not to do and what is worth learning. You can track the history of your decisions and their consequences. If you wish, you can write down a personal decision-making cheat sheet based on your year of “logging” experience in order to avoid the mistakes that you are prone to.

But it is also worth taking care of the future. The easiest way is to take a sheet of flipchart with 12 months marked on it and hang it at home. On it, with large strokes, mark global events in life. Wedding anniversary, vacation, end of project, quarterly financial statements, audits and more.

Further, already at work, have an A4 sheet with the current month with more detailed events, helping to prepare in advance for important events. Now you can plan your activities without forgetting the most important things.

I would like to note that, depending on the role in the project, some preparatory steps will need to be done very much in advance (for example, six months in advance) so as not to miss the deadlines. A week before the end of the month, you should look again at the annual plan and throw in more detailed activities that need to be done in the next month.

Learn from the best

If you want to be strong and modern at something, you should find someone who is already the best at it. The Internet helps to add the best of the best to your surroundings, even if you do not know them, are not located in the same city and do not speak the same language.

When someone authoritative for you refers to a book, it would be good to find it. This will better understand the train of thought of a citizen. It is also worth keeping track of their LiveJournal, blogs, social networks, performances, etc. There you will find all the necessary trends.

You should observe the behavior of the leaders available to you, try to comprehend their actions, the decisions made and the arguments due to which it was made. It is advisable to log this information as well, so that in the future, having increased the managerial fat, we can come to new conclusions and subtleties of the decisions made. It turns out that you can even talk to almost any leader. These are people like you or me, and they also want to communicate. Often we can hear the phrase “...come to me with any ideas and questions on any topic. I'm always happy to help." And this is not politeness, but a real interest in the exchange of knowledge, experience and support for cool ideas from any colleague.

And if you personally come across a cool professional, this is success. You have to hold on to such people, you need to learn from them. Do not drift, demonstrate your solutions, listen to shocking criticism, cry, but continue to wind constructively on your mustache. The rest know that he is cool, but they are afraid of loud criticism that can destroy your reputation.

• Research - things that I have encountered, but which are not clear to me. I return to them and, at least superficially, I will research what it is and what it is eaten with. This usually results in the need to fully fill this gap in knowledge.
• Cheat Sheets - This is where I keep simple lists for self-checking. They help even with the brain turned off to make sure that you have not forgotten anything. Here I have cheat sheets for developing test designs, for working out project risks, for preparing for meetings, etc.

Further, on the sheets I started a table with margins (primarily for books):

• Name
• Author
• Cover (rarely, when I remember the name, but I recognize the picture from a thousand)
• Heading (it will be useful for those who respect harmony and structure. Mark "business", "development", "testing", "architecture" and so on, and then filter when it's time to pull up this or that area)
• How did I know about her? (colleague, forum, blog… You can return to this source, discuss and build good business relationships, discovering new perspectives on the same things)
• Why is it worth reading? (what can be found in it and how it differs from competitive publications)
• What will be useful for me? (at the current level of development. It is worth changing this field periodically. It may well turn out that some books are already useless and I learned a lot from others.)
• Why do I need it? (what will change when I get this new knowledge? How and where can I apply it?)

Now you can always see what is more important to read or remember in the first place in order to get a greater increase in efficiency both in life and at work. And now it's easier to share with a colleague exactly those materials from your collection that will be useful to him.

This does not guarantee that the coolest books for you will pop up on the list. It may well turn out that you are already too well immersed in this topic, or are not yet ready to perceive it at this level. Therefore, if after a couple of pomodoros there is nothing useful for you, then shouldn’t it be postponed?

Development
Hidden text• Extreme Programming: Test Driven Development
• Clean architecture. The art of software development
• Flexible development of programs in Java and C++. Principles, patterns and techniques
• Ideal programmer. How to Become a Software Development Professional
• Java. Efficient Programming
• Java philosophy
• Clean code: creation, analysis and refactoring
• Java Concurrency in practice
• Perfect code. Master Class
• Highly loaded applications. Programming, scaling, support
• UNIX. Professional programming
• Spring in action
• Algorithms. Construction and analysis
• Computer networks
• Java 8. Beginner's Guide
• C++ programming language
• Release it! Software design and development for those who care
• Kent Beck - Test Driven Development
• Domain Based Design (DDD). Structuring of complex software systems

The test is

Hidden text• “Dot Com Testing” by Roman Savin
• Foundations of Software Testing ISTQB Certification
• Software Testing: An ISTQB-ISEB Foundation Guide
• A Practitioner's Guide to Software Test Design
• Managing the Testing Process. Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing
• Pragmatic Software Testing: Becoming an Effective and Efficient Test Professional
• Key testing processes. Planning, preparing, conducting, improving
• How Google tests
• The Expert Test Manager
• The "A" Word. Under the Covers of Test Automation
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach
•Explore It! Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing

Katy

Hidden text• acm.thymus.ru
• exercism.io
• www.codeabbey.com
• codekata.pragprog.com
• e-maxx.ru/algo

Podcasts

Hidden text• devzen.ru
• sdcast.ksdaemon.ru
• radio-t.com
• razbor-poletov.com
• theartofprogramming.podbean.com
• androiddev.apptractor.ru
• devopsdeflope.ru
• runetologia.podfm.ru
• ctocast.com
• eslpod.com
• radio-qa.com
• soundcloud.com/podlodka
• www.se-radio.net
• changelog.com/podcast
• www.yegor256.com/shift-m.html

Sources of useful materials

Hidden text• martinfowler.com
• twitter.com/asolntsev
• ru-ru.facebook.com/asolntsev
• vk.com/1tworks
• mtsepkov.org
• www.facebook.com/mtsepkov
• twitter.com/gvanrossum
• testing.googleblog.com
• dzone.com
• qastugama.blogspot.com
• cartmendum.livejournal.com
• www.facebook.com/maxim.dorofeev
• forum.mnogosdelal.ru
• www.satisfice.com/blog
• twitter.com/jamesmarcusbach
• news.ycombinator.com
• www.baeldung.com/category/weekly-review
• jug.ru
• www.e-executive.ru
• tproger.ru
• www.javaworld.com
• less.works

Communications

Hidden text• The Assertiveness Pocketbook
• Say "NO" first. Secrets of Professional Negotiators
• You can agree on everything! How to get the most out of any negotiation
• Psychology of persuasion. 50 proven ways to be persuasive
• Tough negotiations. How to benefit in any circumstances. Practical guide
• I always know what to say. Book-training on successful negotiations
• Kremlin School of Negotiations
• Difficult dialogues. What and how to say when the stakes are high
• The new NLP code, or the Grand Chancellor wants to meet you!

silver bullets

Hidden textnull

Coaching

Hidden text• Effective coaching. Technologies for the development of an organization through the training and development of employees in the process of work
• Coaching: emotional competence
• High performance coaching. New management style, People development, High efficiency

Leadership

Hidden text• Psychology of influence
• How to win friends and influence people
• Charisma of a leader
• Leader without a title. A modern parable about real success in life and business
• Development of leaders. How to understand your management style and communicate effectively with people of other styles
• “Leader and tribe. Five levels of corporate culture»

Management

Hidden text• How to herd cats
• “Ideal leader. Why they cannot become and what follows from this”
• Manager tools
• Management practice
• Deadline. A novel about project management
• Management styles. Effective and ineffective
• Break all the rules first! What do the best managers in the world do differently?
• From good to great. Why some companies make breakthroughs and others don't...
• Command or obey?
• Gemba kaizen. The path to cost reduction and quality improvement
• Break all the rules first
• New goal. How to Combine Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints
• Team approach. Building a High-Performing Organization

Motivation

Hidden text• Drive. What really motivates us
• Anti-Carnegie
• Project "Phoenix". A novel about how DevOps is changing business for the better
• Toyota kata
• Why some countries are rich and others are poor. The Origin of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
• Discovering the organizations of the future

Out of the box thinking

Hidden text• Six Thinking Hats
• Goldrat haystack syndrome
• Your Golden Key
• Think like a mathematician. How to solve any problems faster and more efficiently
• Russia in a concentration camp
• Mental hospital in the hands of patients. Alan Cooper on interfaces
• Geniuses and outsiders
• Black Swan. Under the sign of unpredictability
• Seeing What Others Don't
• How we make decisions

Project management

Hidden text• Impact mapping: How to improve the efficiency of software products and development projects
• "How much does a software project cost"
• PMBook (Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide))
• The mythical man-month, or How software systems are created
• Waltzing with the Bears: Managing Risk in Software Development Projects
• Critical Chain Goldrat
• Target. Continuous improvement process

self-digging

Hidden text• Strategy of happiness. How to set a goal in life and get better on the way to it
• Sex, money, happiness and death. In search of myself
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Powerful personal development tools
• Self-confidence training. A set of exercises for developing confidence
• Gain confidence in yourself. What does it mean to be assertive
• Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience
• Strength of will. How to develop and strengthen
• How to catch luck
• Diamond Cutter. Business and life management system
• Introduction to Applied Psychology of Attention
• Primary cry
• Synchronization
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design
• Outliers: The Story of Success
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
• Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology
• Emotional intellect. Why it might mean more than IQ

speed reading

Hidden text• How to Read Books Guide to Reading Great Works
• Superbrain. Operation manual, or How to increase intelligence, develop intuition and improve your memory
• Speed ​​reading. How to remember more by reading 8 times faster

Time management

Hidden text• Jedi techniques
• Think slow… Decide fast
• Life at full capacity. Energy management is the key to high performance, health and happiness
• To work with the head. Success patterns from an IT specialist
• Beat procrastination! How to stop putting things off until tomorrow
• 12 weeks a year
• Maximum concentration. How to Maintain Efficiency in the Age of Clip Thinking
• Essentialism. The Path to Simplicity
• Death by meetings

Facilitation

Hidden text• Facilitator's guide. How to lead a group to make a joint decision
• Agile retrospective. How to turn a good team into a great one
• Retrospective of the project. How Project Teams Look Back to Move Forward
• Quick start in agile retrospectives
• Practice of visual thinking. An original method for solving complex problems
• Visual notes. An Illustrated Guide to Sketchnoting
• Speak and show
• Scribing. Easy to explain
• Visualize it! How to use graphics, stickers and mind maps for teamwork
• 40 Icebreakers for Small Groups (Graham Knox)
• Quick problem solving with stickers
• Visual notes. An Illustrated Guide to Sketchnoting