Want to Learn a New Technology? Volunteer to Present It at a Meetup!

Today I’ll teach you the best way to learn a new programming language, framework, or technique.

Learning new tech is one of the easiest ways that you can advance your career. You’ll have one additional tool that you can use to write software for your customers. And it just might put you on the fast track to that new job or next promotion!

Unfortunately, most software engineers struggle to learn.

The reason most frequently cited is lack of time.

Our employers usually don’t set aside work hours for professional development, and we don’t want to eat into our personal time. I’ll dig into this issue in a future essay. Some additional reasons we struggle?

We read articles and blogs, but we don’t apply what we read.

We attend training courses, but we leave the potential learnings in the classroom.

We complete tutorials, but we don’t know where to go next.

Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy way to short circuit all of these problems. Mathematician Hugo Rossi provides the secret:

The goal of teaching is learning, not teaching.

Here’s how to learn by teaching, step by step:

Step 1: Find a technology that you want to learn.

This step seems obvious, but it deserves a little explanation.

You could learn the new & shiny hotness. You could learn what the market is demanding. But make sure it’s something that you want to learn because if you don’t want to use it you’ll lose it.

Step 2: Find a meetup that’s looking for speakers.

This may be the easiest step, as so many meetups have moved online in the age of COVID-19.

Hop on Meetup.com. Search for the tech or ecosystem you think would find your new tech valuable. While writing I searched for online JavaScript events and couldn’t find the bottom of the list. And as a former meetup organizer, I can tell you we are always looking for speakers.

Step 3: Contact the organizer and volunteer.

As soon as the organizer says “Yes!” the clock has started, and you now have intrinsic motivation.

Just like a programming task at work, you now have a specific goal and deadline. Now it’s time to start building your talk, learning what you need to know “just in time.” In a future essay, we’ll talk about how to do that.