Tim’s Four Things for 2021

 in Programming  tagged css / html / learn / C# / web / technology / Docker / Azure by

Tim Corey is one of my favorite instructors on YouTube. He’s just posted a video on YouTube called How To Make 2021 Count – A learning path, 4 things to learn, and 4 to avoid. There are many paths you could take in your IT career, and this video is just one opinion. As you can see he’s a C# guy, not a Java guy. You could substitute Java for C# in this list, and something else for Azure. What are the four IT things to learn or improve on?

  1. C#
  2. The Web (HTML + CSS + a bit of JavaScript + some ASP.NET Core)
  3. Docker (not a deep knowledge required)
  4. Microsoft’s Azure (ecomony of scale)

These above are just some ideas. The most important thing is to have a direction that suits yourself. Have an objective. Stay focused. Order matters because things tend to build on each other. Set your goals for 2021. For example, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET, and Xamarin are built on C#. Whatever you decide, practice, practice, practice. Hands-on. Dig. Don’t worry about creating a huge awesome application when you are just learning.

Tim also covers some things that perhaps we should avoid right now. It’s not that these things aren’t any good, for some of them, it might be best to wait and tackle it next year in 2022 or maybe not. Perhaps a better way to say this is to just say that you should avoid taking a deep dive into any one of these topics. It might be better to take a deep dive into C# and Docker.

  1. Machine Learning (ML) (very cool, but advanced)
  2. JavaScript Framework (Angular, React, Vue etc – focus on JavaScript instead)
  3. Xamarin (In 2022 “MAY” have major change .NET 6)
  4. Microservices (Kubernetes) (based on C#, Docker, Web development and other topics…)

Overall, Tim makes the following points.

  1. Be Specific: What you want to learn?
  2. Time Bound: Take small steps.
  3. Practice: What you do that matters.
  4. Have Patience and don’t get distracted.

It’s a good idea to know at least one programming language really well. If C# is your choice, then you’ll want to learn some of the advanced/intermediate things like generics, lists, delegates, lambda functions, LINQ, dynamics, recursion and others. You should also learn your design patterns – at least a few of them. You should also be familiar with test driven development and software architectures. I am not familiar with all of these things.