Each learner uses different methods in order to obtain a certain knowledge or skill. In this episode, Jonathan and Jillian relate to the listeners as they share their techniques and strategies when learning new things. They also tackle about the variety of mediums they use, different online learning platforms, and getting certifications and taking online courses.

Hello everybody and welcome to another exciting episode of Adventures in DevOps. I'm your host for the day, Jonathan Hall, and here in the virtual studio, after much time away, we have returned our wonderful co-host, Jillian.

 

Hi Jonathan, and thank you for the nice intro, it's good to be back.

 

We missed you so much.

 

Aw, thank you. I missed you guys too.

 

Aww. Today, unfortunately, Will had to run. He may join us later if he's done with, I guess he said he had an incident or something at his day job. That's the sad part about being employed is sometimes you have to run away. But maybe he'll join us and maybe not. We'll see if we get a pleasant surprise before the show's over. So today, I think we should talk about learning things. What do you think about that, Jillian?

 

I think that sounds good. I think it's a very important skill set when you're in a technical field, you're always learning something new. I'm very rarely working on like something that I feel like, okay, 100% up and down, I know this, you know, like the way that I used to know my multiplication tables or something like that. So

 

Right.

 

yeah, I think that's a great topic.

 

Three times five is eight, right? 3 times 5 is 8, right?

 

Oh, I don't even know. So I thought multiplication tables because this is the stuff that my kids are doing. They keep asking me these questions and I'm like, guys, I don't know, I have a computer that does this for me. Their teachers do not like that answer. They do not like that answer at all.

 

You know,

 

But that's

 

when

 

like.

 

I was, this probably is true for you too, but you know, when I was in high school trying to use a calculator, the teacher would always say, you're not gonna have a calculator everywhere you go. Well, jokes on them, because we all have calculators everywhere we go now.

 

Yeah, calculators and spell check and grammar check and punctuation

 

Yeah.

 

check. It's like teachers.

 

And Wikipedia. Yeah, that that excuse

 

Cool.

 

just doesn't fly very long, but still it is important to learn things. And I was thinking about this recently because I've been part of a conversation about whether or not it makes sense to do a corporate subscription to Udemy. And it also comes up a lot in the course of talking about hiring people, you know, what kind of questions should you ask? To determine whether they have the aptitude to. take on new skills and learn new skills. So I'm kind of curious what you think and we can compare notes. How does it make the most sense to learn a new skillset or a new piece of, you know, there's a lot of things you can learn. We can talk about really big things like, I wanna learn Kubernetes or even just simple things like, what's the command line flag for that one thing I forgot to do, you know, and everything in between. But generally speaking, What do you think makes the most sense to, or how do you approach these sorts of questions when you need to learn something?

 

I tend to jump around a lot. Like initially I'll go in with good intentions that I'm gonna learn the foundations of this new technology that I'm supposed to be learning. And then about halfway through I get bored and just like start building and breaking things. I do, since you mentioned Udemy, I do actually quite like them. I think that was one of the first sort of online course platforms that I ever started to actually buy courses from. I do have to say though, that part of that is that I really like their price point. A lot of times their courses go on sale for like $10. So even if I only pay attention to two or three of the lessons, as long as I really got something out of those lessons, I'm like, okay, you know, this, this was worth the like 10 or $15 or whatever I paid. I'm not sure what the business pricing is and kind of the, how to balance how much value you're getting versus price. But, um,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

but I do actually really like that platform. They have a few really good courses that I like for like data science and machine learning. There's an instructor there named, um, Jose Portilla. And some of the instructors on there have really like made this, you know, like their whole business, they take it seriously, they have TAs. Um, it's, it's a pretty well run platform. So I do a lot on Udemy. And then I also generally try to keep current. I haven't been doing as good of a job with it lately, but, um, generally to keep current, I actually really like subscribing to different mailing newsletters. And a lot of times I'll just like find a blog that's something, you know, where somebody is writing about. some very niche topic of bioinformatics and HPC, and I'll subscribe to their newsletter. And I like that because it's kind of like, it doesn't require quite as much brain power as taking a course. It's the kind of thing I sit down in the morning, I'm spinning up my instances or looking at reports, and then I'll also be reading through these newsletters to just kind of keep current and introduce myself to new concepts. what new tools might be coming up the pipeline, that kind of thing.

 

Nice.

 

What about you? Where do you tend to go when you need to learn something new?

 

Um, it depends. So like if I'm trying to just learn the basics of something, uh, Google, like, like what, what is, if my question was like, what is Kubernetes and will it solve a problem for me, I would start with Google to just get a high level understanding, and then I might dive into some YouTube videos or something. Uh, maybe a conference talk on the topic. Uh, you know, sort of, sort of for, for something a little bit more in depth than just here's, you know, what Kubernetes is cloud orchestration, something more in depth than that, get a feel for what it is. But then when it comes to like, I've decided I've committed myself to learn this thing. I usually go for books or hands-on experience. And then the hands-on experience, if it's Kubernetes or a new programming language or something, I'm gonna play with the thing.

 

Okay.

 

And of course I'll have thousands of questions during that and Google and Stack Overflow and websites like that are. go to, you know, they're always at my fingertips at that stage. I've never really done the Udemy thing, although there was one time I was actually trying to learn Terraform a couple of years ago and I used, it wasn't Udemy, it was LinkedIn's training platform. I can't remember what it was called. Um, but I took a very short course on that. It, and honestly, it was, I was just trying to learn, you know, high level stuff, I didn't, I didn't get real in depth there, the in depth stuff came later when I was, uh, doing it on my own. So that's kind of my only experience with like video instruction when it comes to learning. But I definitely know people who are advocates for Udemy or things like that. I just, I guess I'm gonna spend 15 bucks on a, to learn a thing. I kind of prefer to have a book because I just feel like it's so much more in depth than I can get from a video, but that's a very personal preference.

 

I think that must be very personal because I'm completely the opposite. I'm a very visual learner and so I like the video and the diagrams and, you know, just like things being interactive. So I prefer video, but I do definitely think that's a personal preference. That's another thing to take into account. Like how do you learn? Do you prefer books? Do you prefer, you know, for the listeners, do you prefer books? Do you prefer videos? Do you know? Maybe you should try both.

 

I think, I mean, certainly it's easier to get in depth in a book, at least for certain topics. You know, like, I don't know, if you're studying programming syntax for something, I don't know. I feel like a book is a better media for that just because it's, you know, you can put pages and pages of syntax or whatever, or a website. It doesn't have to be a book. But for other things, I think some people are very... much more effective watching somebody do the thing. So yeah, it depends a lot on, in my opinion, it depends on A, what I'm learning and B, what the learner's preferences are.

 

I think it definitely must depend on what you're learning too, because all that I can think of is like being in college and having these books, and then you know, learning the syntax for like, C++ and whatnot, and then getting out of college and being like, oh, this is all out of date. This is all a couple

 

Hehehe

 

years out of date. This is no good at all. Although those were textbooks, not like, you know, I don't know what O'Reilly or whatever kind of books are out there now. What about certifications? Do you ever go for certifications or did you at one point in your career and you don't now? or vice

 

Um,

 

versa.

 

I got certified once when I ran my, I ran a dial-up ISP many, many years ago. Uh, back before, back when dial-up still existed, right? And my, my backbone trunk, so to speak, my, my main connection to serve my customers was a wireless connection. So I got a certification to install that wireless equipment. That's the only certification I've ever had in my life. Uh, Oh, I got CPR certified once too, so I've had two certifications. Um...

 

CPR one is good.

 

That's a lot more probably was a course expired now. I got that in high school, but that's a lot more practical than installing this particular brand of wireless technology that doesn't exist anymore. Pre-dates Wi-Fi, so that was before 8 or 2.11. Anyway, so no, certifications have not been a cornerstone of my career, to say the least. I'm not a big advocate of certificates, but I do think they can be valuable for certain people in certain... jobs, especially cloud-based jobs. If you're trying to do AWS or something like that, I think there can be a lot of value in that, especially early in one's career. If you already have five or 10 years experience, people are going to look at that rather than your certifications. But if you don't have that experience on your CV yet, I do think that those certifications are a good way to boost your hireability very quickly.

 

Yeah, I would agree with that. I would say if you have a choice between like working on a project and doing a certification, you know, there's only so much time in a day, you can only do so much. Go for the project. There are definitely certain fields where they seem to stress getting certifications more. So like, for example, when I worked in IT, they really wanted you to get certifications. I don't know how much of that was like, we have budget allocated to continuing education and you had better use it because we don't like having unspent budget. and how much of that was real. But I mean, you know, it was good. They very nicely paid for me to get some certifications and I got them and they did really seem to kind of press on that. That was also a lot earlier in my career. That was like, you know, the first like four or five years that I was working as a professional in the field, I suppose. I haven't had anybody ask me about any kind of certifications. in quite a while. I think I was asked like once if I was certified on AWS and I was just like, no. And that was kind of the end of that conversation.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

But I don't know if for jobs and things, I also haven't like applied for any kind of job in years now. So I don't know if that's a thing that, if you go and you apply in certain fields, they wanna see that you're certified in the cloud. I just don't know.

 

Yeah, I don't know. I've never, I mean, having not having certificate certifications means that I have not applied for jobs that require it. So I just kind of brush over those. So yeah, I'm not the best one to answer that question. But I do think that I don't know if it's a hard requirement. But see, even if it's not a hard requirement, especially if you're new, I do think that having a certificate will show that you have a certain amount of knowledge that you couldn't otherwise prove. It's hard to prove that you have knowledge by playing with Kubernetes on your Raspberry Pi in the basement. Maybe it's good experience, but it's hard to prove that. At least the certification proves it in a sense.

 

Yeah, that's what I found too. I mean, they're good to have. You know, I still list a couple of them, but I don't know that I would put the time or money into a new one unless I really wanted to like change fields, I guess.

 

Oh yeah, yeah.

 

Like I know a couple of people that have gotten, what's the business degree, like a business administration degree or something

 

Mm-hmm.

 

like, but it's something like adjacent to, you know, whatever the thing is that they're doing and they go and they get a cert, certification or, you know, another master's degree or something like that.

 

Yeah, sure, sure. When, so aside from Udemy, have you tried any other of the video based platforms? And if so, have you had any, what's your experience?

 

I have only tried Udemy and I did one of the certifications through Udacity.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I did really like the program on Udacity. I think they've restructured them since then, but the one that I did was a machine learning engineer which was kind of like a mix of, it was basically like data science and machine learning on the cloud. So it was a nice mix of things. And that was just a really good certification. That was actually, that was in my last job. And they were still, they were a little bit less like, we want for you to do certifications. Like when I worked in IT, they wanted for you to do at least one or two a year. And then in my last job, I think they wanted for you to do like one like every maybe like two to three years, just to state current.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And so I did that one. It was, I mean, it was really good. I really liked the program. I thought they did a good job. They had like projects and then you do the projects and you submit your work and then you get an actual. like an actual like person grading the assignments and giving you feedback and you have to get like to a certain level before you know before you pass and you get the certificate. So it's a little bit it's like a little bit guided. It's not completely self paced the way that you know Udemy courses like for most Udemy courses you go you can sign up at any time and it's completely self paced. You do everything on your own which of course you know has pros and cons. But this one was like. You know, you start on a certain date, you get your assignments in by a certain date and you do the certifications. That, those are the only ones I've tried. I haven't tried the LinkedIn learning. The poor LinkedIn bots keep trying to get me to try it. By the way, like

 

Yeah.

 

every once in a while, they're like, did you know you get LinkedIn learning? And I'm like, oh guys, I'm sure, you know, I'm sure that it's great. I just, I just don't want to. I'm good, I'm good mostly with YouTube. And

 

Mm-hmm.

 

then yeah, very occasionally I'll go to Udemy and get something.

 

How do you decide when YouTube isn't good enough and that you don't make sense?

 

generally if I want to go deeper on a topic or if it's a topic that I'm really not familiar with. So I think one of the last ones that I took was a course in using AWS Amplify, which is like an AWS, I suppose you could say it's like a full stack framework for building web applications and I don't do a lot of web development. So it was kind of, it was like new enough that I was like, okay, I kind of, I want, you know, I want like a background and somebody holding my hand a little and having more in-depth lessons and giving me lots of, they give you the solutions and the code and all that. So I think that was the last one that I took. And so, yeah, I think that's generally my distinction. If I'm really, really unfamiliar with it, then I like to go and take more of a course style or something that's just generally gonna be more in-depth. It's the same thing when I did the certification, I was still pretty new to both the cloud and the more kind of modern day machine learning. as opposed to just running like a million random correlations and seeing what falls out.

 

I guess I just remembered I do have experience with an online learning platform, but not as a student. I taught a course one time, it was a two-day course for O'Reilly a couple years ago. So they have a good online learning platform. I guess I could say it's good. I mean, from a teacher's perspective, it seemed like a pretty solid platform. I can't comment on the content, except mine. My content was amazing. but it was one time, so I'm sorry you missed it.

 

Yes.

 

Everyone else's content, I'm assuming is equally amazing, but I don't know that from experience, so. Um

 

you know that reminds me I did take an RLE course once I took

 

Oh

 

like

 

yeah.

 

their Python certification or something but I did it right after my youngest was born and I don't remember any of it because there's like a six month gap in my memory there where

 

Oh no.

 

I don't know like the world could have imploded and I don't think I would remember it so it's probably I'm sure it's great it's probably great

 

Yeah, yeah. All right. So when it comes to like daily things, when you're trying to... dig yourself out of a hole or remember that thing that you forgot about or look up the syntax for something. What are your go-to resources for that sort of learning?

 

Google and Stack Overflow. I also like, I use the PyCharm IDE and a lot

 

Mm-hmm.

 

of times, like I'm doing a lot of stack trace type things and there's this on a Mac, it's command B. And like, if you're on say a function or something and you press command B, it will bring you to the source of that function. And then you can look at the source code. I do that a lot. I do that so much. That's probably like my most used like. tech tip is make sure that you're working in a proper IDE where it's self-documenting. Meaning if you're having trouble with a function, you have a very easy way to look up that function and figure out exactly what to do.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And I like PyCharm for that. Besides that, Google and Stack Overflow, I think Stack Overflow runs all of our lives. You know, I remember one day when Stack Overflow was down and the whole team was just like, we should just go home. Like, what are we doing here? We have no purpose.

 

Yeah, which is worse when Stack Overflow goes down or when GitHub goes down?

 

I think Stack Overflow actually, because Stack Overflow is probably, you know, like Stack Overflow is like, I want an answer now, whereas Git is like, ah, you know, like, whatever, I can push it in an hour or two, and I have a lot of the source libraries on my computer anyways. So, I would say Stack Overflow is a more immediate problem.

 

All right. I was having some frustrations with GitHub today, which made me think of that. It wasn't down. It was just, I think, that some servers out of sync, because my notifications would show old notifications I had snoozed three hours before and stuff like that. Um...

 

I turn all my notifications and get up off

 

Yeah.

 

all of them. There are still many. I belong to like a lot of repose and I'm just like, no guys. If it's that important, somebody will email me or contact me directly.

 

What other angles can we take here? I mean, I guess I could answer the question too. You know, I rely of course on Google and Stack Overflow. And since I'm a Go developer, I depend on the online Go docs a lot at pkg.go.dev. That's the equivalent, I think, to your PyCharm IDE documentation there. And each language of course has their own documentation ecosystem. So, you know, the language documentation for the language I'm using is... usually at my fingertips. Yeah, so I guess that's kind of my answer to that. Do you have any resources you use for like bigger topics, but I don't know, do you follow any bloggers or maybe YouTube channels or anything to sort of keep up to speed on certain things?

 

So I follow a publication, is that what they're called, on Medium that

 

Mm-hmm.

 

it's one of these, I suppose it's like a journal that multiple people can submit to. So it's not just any one person. Anybody can presumably submit their blog article to Towards Data Science and it gets accepted or not. Like there is a group of moderators that gives the final yes, no, but it tends to be fairly broad and it has... you know, topics surrounding data science, machine learning, and also a lot of like how that intersects with cloud computing. Those are, yeah, that's the main one that I do. And there's another one on medium. I don't know, something, something about startups that I like, I kind of always like keeping up with that. A lot of these, I kind of just like to keep up with what's on Twitter. Like I'll check Twitter once or twice a day and see, you know, like people that I follow, if they've released new frameworks or if they have, you know. new updates to the frameworks that are there. Those are the big ones for just kind of like coffee. I don't like, so I like to separate out a lot of my learning into when I have sort of a lot of brain power and when I don't, I think that might be like the parent in me too. Like how much sleep did I get last night? Really, what do I wanna be doing here? And so I like, you know, like blog posts and sort of like coffee reading. kind of for that kind of time. And then if I really have to dig into something, that's typically when I'm on Stack Overflow or maybe even taking a course, YouTube videos, like really like getting, you know, getting my hands dirty with, okay, what exactly are we doing? What about you? Cause you keep up with a lot of the, you probably keep up on more like DevOps topics, which is kind of awful considering that that's the topic of the show than I do. Are there any particular like newsletters or, you know,

 

Well, the main thing I follow of course is this great podcast called adventures in DevOps. I learned most of my DevOps stuff there.

 

course as you should.

 

Although I haven't learned as much lately since the Jillian host hasn't been on the show as much lately.

 

I know, I know, but it's okay, I'm back

 

She's

 

now,

 

back though,

 

don't

 

so

 

worry, it's

 

we're good to go, we're

 

all

 

good.

 

behind us.

 

Well, so I don't follow DevOps specifically, but in a broader sense, I follow Dev and Ops maybe. There's a few bloggers I suppose I follow. I follow Kent Beck, who's more known for software development than for DevOps, so to speak. Dave Farley, he has a YouTube channel, which is great. It's very DevOps-centric. It's called Continuous Delivery. A few others I follow on LinkedIn. So, you know, I tend to see a sort of a mix of different people's posts there. There's a website I like to follow called... look it up to make sure I get the name right. It will never work in theory.org, which publishes or links to published academic research related to software development. So it's not your typical echo chamber of write clean code and that sort of thing, which is maybe fine, but it's actual academic research on topics related to software development. So it's kind of refreshing place to go for that. Um, what else? I really like, there's a few YouTube, I should say there's a few conferences that have YouTube channels I like. Lead Dev is one, GoTo is one. Yeah, I used to be an avid follower of Joel Spolsky, but he doesn't really blog anymore, so. I don't know, there's a lot of people I read.

 

There's Will's YouTube channel too.

 

Which one?

 

We should plug that. Will's

 

Oh

 

YouTube

 

yeah, Will's

 

channel.

 

YouTube channel, yeah. DevOps for developers, it's a good place to go. And of course my YouTube

 

Yes,

 

channel,

 

that's

 

if you're

 

it.

 

learning Go, is a good place to go. No pun intended. Yeah, I guess, I mean, I don't know. I tend to pull out a lot of information from a lot of places, so I can't point to a specific set of people I follow, because I'm always trying to find new information. Because I write every day, so I'm trying to find information that I can, you know, inspiration to write about. So I just kind of keep my eyes open for stuff everywhere. And a lot of that comes from LinkedIn and slot conversations. I'm on several slot groups where I talk to people and ask questions and stuff like that. I guess dev.to

 

That's

 

is

 

another

 

maybe a site.

 

one we didn't talk, we didn't cover.

 

Yeah, yeah, we can talk about that.

 

Hmm,

 

I

 

which

 

guess

 

one?

 

dev.to would be one dimension. I write there. I don't read a lot there because it's usually for more beginners than I am. So I don't find a lot there that I feel teaches me. Although sometimes Google gets me there and I find useful information there. But a lot of people really like to read that dev.to. So yeah, do you want to talk about Slack?

 

Yeah, actually that did remind me that I do belong to a couple Slack channels and that's actually been another really good, like I need information now kind of gateway is being in on these Slack channels. There are a few for like a few different frameworks that I use heavily. There's one that I belong to that it's called Bits and Bio and they're like very much the bioinformatics cloud space and that's been a really fun one to belong to. There's like a lot of nice people in there. So if you're in kind of like, data science on the cloud. That one might be interesting for you. There's one called, they go by Cloud Posse sometimes and Sweet Ops the rest of the time. They publish like a ton of Terraform recipes that I kind of steal and use all the time. I'm very grateful that they're all out there and all open source and that kind of thing. Cause I really rely very heavily on them. And sometimes if I have a question on them, I will just go into their Slack channel and be like, I can't get this thing working. And then like immediately somebody answers me. And it's fantastic. So I'm in there a lot. Those, those are the big ones. And then I'm also in one for, um, some kind of like data science, specific frameworks. Like there's one called, uh, prefect, which is a workflow orchestration manager. And it's interesting because it's one of these tools that like, you need to write code, but then to deploy it, you also need like a pretty deep understanding of, you know, a cluster or an HPC or Kubernetes cluster or something like that. So that has kind of its own like community. And then Jupyter Hub is another tool that I use. It's like a platform for hosting Python code and notebooks and all this kind of stuff. And then they have sort of their own community around deploying Jupyter Hub on the cloud. So a lot of times I'm in these sort of like very niche groups for these very specific frameworks that I use. And then, you know, I'm in there talking about. Like kind of these various specific frameworks and how do we deploy them on the HPC or on Kubernetes? How do we do the scaling? Um, how do we put these on batch? All that kind of thing. I also tend to follow the AWS, uh, documentation and they produce these things called labs, which are the sort of like standalone, like static documentation websites that sort of guide you through a particular problem. Like there's one that I've been on kind of constantly that deploys this tool called Gromacs, which does like, it does like protein predictions and things or molecule predictions rather. But it's one of these softwares that you don't just have to know the software, you have to know like how to scale it out on the, on the cloud because it needs to be scaled out like among multiple computers. And, and AWS has a really good lab on like kind of going through like, okay, these are the steps and these are how you do it and all that kind of thing. So it's really tends to be like sometimes I'm just like, oh Helm, I forget the flag for upgrade, you know, like what is it? And I'll go Google it. But a lot of times I'm really like looking for these very specific frameworks and this kind of thing that I'm stuck in. And so I don't know how generally applicable it is to the rest of the listeners, except for all the tools that I just mentioned, you know, if you use those too, there are Slack groups and Discord groups and there's like all the groups, go find them and commiserate with me. We'll get through it together.

 

Nice. I'm on a couple of different Slack groups. They're more focused towards like Agile leadership type stuff, but one of them in particular has some good DevOps technical stuff too. And that's the RAND leadership Slack. If you Google for that, you'll find, you can ask for an invite. You have to send an invite request to an email address, but just Google for the RAND leadership Slack, R-A-N-D-S, if you're interested. And they have... I don't know, 20,000 people on this Slack, I think. It's a pretty large group with channels ranging from DevOps to programming to, places to get advice for hiring and interviews, incident response, and a lot of the softer skills stuff like, I don't know, product management and parenting and... groups for different religions, all sorts of stuff on here. The common theme though is that it's people with an interest in leadership in their companies, I guess. That's the name, leadership slack. So that one, that's one I can recommend. It's a good place, good people on there and a lot of good information. The other one that's kind of similar, but it's a smaller slack. I think there's still several thousand people, but it's a lot less traffic. is the Hands-on Agile Slack group. Again, Google for it. It's a lot less technical. It's more about the sort of management side of Agile. So if you're interested in that, then it might be for you. But for people, probably for most of our listeners, the Reign's Leadership Slack would be a better one.

 

That does sound interesting. I think sometimes like soft skills and communication presentation skills, all these kinds of things are underrated, but they'll probably something that will take you like farther in your career than your technical skills will

 

Definitely.

 

at the end of the day, like they have a much longer shelf life than whatever this flag and Kubernetes is that like, I'm not even going to remember in five minutes.

 

Right.

 

So I think those are really great to go get involved in.

 

And not to mention, how many people do we know who are wonderful people people, but don't have the technical skills that advance quickly versus the ones who have the best technical skills but are just stuck in a job lower than they want because they don't have those people skills. So yeah, so I don't say that you should neglect technical skills, but you need at least a small amount of the people skills and the soft skills too.

 

Absolutely, I definitely agree with that one.

 

Well, what else can we talk about with regard to learning or have we covered at all?

 

I don't remember where this quote comes from, but it's something along the lines. The best way to learn something is to teach something. So if you're kind of in the process of learning something, what I always find really helpful is I sort of like write documentation to myself. And I joke sometimes it's like, you know, it's for me in like 10 minutes when I've forgotten the thing that it is that I'm doing, you know, in my old age here. But like and. But that still holds like very, very true. And I actually really do do that. I'll just sit down and write, even if it's just like a long kind of markdown document of like, okay, these are the steps that I took and this is what I did. And then when I was less of a slacker about my blog, like, I would put those up as blog posts or as like small static websites, like, okay, here's kind of this lab on doing this very particular topic. And you really will find that over time, people will come and ask you. questions and it actually it really does deepen your understanding of a topic. So I'm still I wish I could remember where the quote came from so that I could attribute it properly, but it's it's something along the lines of you know if you really want to learn something well try to teach it because it will show you very quickly where your kind of like gaps and knowledge are.

 

Yeah, I've definitely heard that stated in a beautiful way. So, and I agree with it. If you're struggling to learn something, teaching it is a surefire way to boost your own skill level or your understanding at least so that you can teach someone else.

 

Yeah, try to teach it to your kids. I do that every once in a while, and I tend to fail pretty spectacularly because there are just some things I don't know. What is the internet? I don't even know what the internet is. I use it every day.

 

Oh, haven't

 

I use

 

you

 

it

 

seen the IT

 

all day

 

crowd?

 

every day,

 

It's

 

but

 

a little box

 

I don't

 

with a blinking

 

really know

 

light.

 

what it is. Oh yeah, I mean, that too.

 

Yeah.

 

Don't you worry. Soon your kids will get big enough to ask these kinds of questions and then and then you'll be stuck with me being like, oh I don't even know what I don't know. This is bad. This is bad scenes, guys.

 

I did an episode of my podcast, an early one, with a children's book author, Miriam Tosino, where she writes children's books about answering questions like this, like what is the internet? And the two main characters in the book are Cero and Onus, which are binary digits, and they go through their little adventures in the binary world to teach children about computers. So maybe I should send you a gift copy of one of these books so you can explain to your children.

 

That

 

what

 

is

 

the internet

 

very cute,

 

is.

 

I think I would like that. That's very fun.

 

All right, well, are we done? Do you think of anything else we

 

I

 

should

 

think

 

talk

 

so,

 

about?

 

yeah, that's all that I got. Google, blog posts, subscribe to newsletters if you really want to know, like maybe take a course. If somebody else is paying, get a certificate.

 

Yeah, nice.

 

I don't know what I'd do when I had to pay for it. I don't think so.

 

Yeah, I mean, it was a business expense, but for personal development, there's not a whole lot of certifications that I would be paying for. my personal

 

No, I don't

 

opinion.

 

think so. I haven't taken one since it's been under my own expense report, I guess. I don't know, maybe I should though.

 

Alright, well should we do some picks? I think we've already mentioned a handful of

 

Yeah,

 

reasonable

 

let's do

 

picks

 

it.

 

throughout the show, talking about... channels and whatnot, but we can do some official picks. Do you have any ready?

 

Um, sure. So I guess first of all, I'll pick what I was talking about earlier in the show. There's a publication called towards data science. Uh, if you're interested in kind of the, you know, any sort of topics surrounding data science or machine learning, that's a really good place to start. They cover all kinds of topics from like very, you know, beginning beginner ML kind of tutorials to, um, to, you know, to more advanced to cloud computing. To Kubernetes, you know, all this kind of stuff. There's also a. instructor that I really like on Udemy and I have actually taken quite a few of his courses. His name is, and hopefully I don't butcher it, it's Jose Portilla and he does a lot of data science courses. He has a really good one on building dashboards with this Python framework called Dash that I really liked that I thought was really good. And then for more fun picks, I'm going to pick the HBO adaptation of his dark materials. It was so good. Usually I don't like like movie and TV show adaptations of, you know, my favorite books, but this one I actually really, really liked. I would recommend not watching the season finales if you have things that you have to do and you don't want to be crying for those things. But besides

 

Oh.

 

that, it was it was a really great show. They did a good job. They kept pretty faithful to the books, you know, like as much as they can. It's it's a TV versus books. But that was the first adaptation of that series that I really liked.

 

Nice.

 

So. That's my fun pic. That's it. What about you, Jonathan?

 

Yeah, so I have a couple of picks. First, I'm going to pick the Ceros and Ona series, since I just mentioned it, for children. If you have children in your life, whether they're yours or maybe they're nieces or nephews or something, these books are fun. You can go to cerosandona.com. I'll spell that because it's kind of weird. It's Z-E-R-U-S-O-N-D-O-N-A.com. Or Z, if you're not from America like I am, the first letter. But yeah, go to xeros.com and check out the books. I think there's three available and they're available in many languages. The first one at least is in English, Spanish, Dutch, German and French. So that covers a large portion of the world's children that can read these books. My second pick, I've picked it before, but it's really relevant to the topic today. It's a book called Commitment. It's a graphic novel. But they introduced the top... or the concept of a knowledge option, which is really relevant to our topic. It's basically the idea of learn enough about a topic to know how long it will take you to learn more about the topic and then stop until you need to know more about the topic. That's just one of the concepts in the book. The book is really more about managing risk in projects. In fact, that's the subtitle. The full title is Commitment, a novel about managing project risk. by Olav Masin. So check that one out. Like I said, it's a graphic novel. So it's actually a really quick read because it's basically cartoons, but don't let that fool you into thinking that it's a children's book or a non-serious topic. It's actually a really good business book. And my fun pick for the week, I haven't done three picks in forever, but my fun pick for the week, we just finished watching the current or most recent season of Star Trek Prodigy, which is, or not. I'm sorry. I said the wrong one. We were watching that too. The one we just finished watching though was lower decks Star Trek lower decks Which I really like if you like the family guy or those sorts of cartoon shows and you like Star Trek you'll enjoy this It's basically a Star Trek show that makes fun of itself They make fun of all the silly gags and Star Trek and that everybody wears ridiculous looking uniforms and things like that, so It's funny half our episodes. I think it was season 3 just finished. So that's my third pick Star Trek lower decks And I guess that is a wrap.

 

Cool.

 

Anything you want to add Jillian before we sign off?

 

Nope, I'm

 

Okay,

 

good.

 

great. Hope to see you all here next week. Until then.