Does it ever feel like there's just too much to learn with Java and you just don't have enough time? Well, today we'll talk about how to get that time back and set you on the right path for learning Java. Stay with us. Tutorials. Tips. Everything you need to know as a beginner job.
Hey again, welcome back to the podcast. Okay, so I just want to offer you a quick gift before we get started. You might be completely new to Java, you're a complete beginner, and if you are, and you haven't yet grabbed our Java Beginner Starter Kit completely for free, then go over to our website at javaeasily.com and go grab it there.
It's a super helpful guide designed for complete beginners and it's going to get you up and running with Java in the shortest time possible. But anyway, on with this episode.
So we're really talking in this episode about the fact that most of the time people feel they don't have enough time to learn something. And I think this is probably really true. Whenever you learn something new or things become difficult, you can often... fall back to these kind of excuses like, you know, I don't have enough time to do this or, you know.
because it's too tricky and that kind of thing. Now, maybe you don't realise they're excuses, but they are actually excuses. Maybe you phrase them in a different way though, so that's just to be kind of cognizant about that. But the fact is, we always have time for things. It's not a question of like whether you have time, it's a question of how you use...
your existing time. So in other words, how you use the time that you currently have. It's not really a question of whether you have time, it's a question of how you utilize that time and make best use of it. For example, watching TV. You know, when you watch TV, right?
you could instead read a book, right? Or you could try out a new concept quickly. So instead of like having two hours in front of the TV on an evening or whatever, just take some of that time to just like, you know, read some technical articles, read a book, browse some websites, you know. Go on Stack Overflow, whatever it might be, or try out some new code or what have you, whatever it might be.
Now, it may well be that you don't want to give up that TV time, right? And you don't want to give up the TV and the relaxation completely. In which case, what you could do is basically when you watch TV, you'll sit down with your laptop.
And also kind of like passively do something at the same time. So try out a bit of code or something as you're watching Netflix or whatever. You can try and do it that way. That works for some people, just like some people work better when they listen to music or they can study better when they listen to music, whereas other people can't. Personally... I cannot listen to music if I'm trying to learn something. I need to be focused and be pretty silent or be in a quiet atmosphere.
But that being said, when I'm programming, you know, music really helps me. In particular, music randomly without lyrics. Electronic music or dance music or whatever. You don't want to know about my musical tests, by the way. But... Yeah, if it's kind of like, you know, high energy dance music or something, then that...
For some reason, it really resonates with my brain and I can really cut code really quickly in that scenario. So you're basically going to find what works for you. And it may well be that you are one of these people who can sit with your laptop in front of the TV, do some code at the same time, and that's fine for you.
I don't recommend that because as I say, I'm more aligned to learning things in a silent kind of, you know, yeah, a silent way of doing things. But yeah, if that works for you, that's fine. But I don't like it because you're neither doing one thing nor the other. You're neither fully relaxed.
relaxing because you've got this programming you're doing as well at the same time, nor are you fully learning something or fully coding because you're actually distracted by what you're seeing on Netflix. But as I say, it might work for you. Give it a try and see how you get on. Another place where you have more time and you think you don't have time is during the course of the working day.
For example, if you're in a project which has, you know, ridiculously long builds, and most projects unfortunately have long builds these days because they're building things to push them through a CI-CD process into Docker images and then into harbor repositories and pull them. down from ECR or whatever to run in Kubernetes environments or whatever it might be.
Ultimately, because the technology is getting more complex, it also means that the build times are then getting pushed out and builds are taking increasingly longer to be able to deal with these increasingly more esoteric technical environments. So because you're going to have long builds, for example.
Instead of just being sat there during a long build, kind of twiddling your thumbs or whatever, or going for a coffee with a teammate, you could utilize that time as well, right? So, you know, you can, if there's a long build of, say, like 15 minutes or something, and you were unsure about something that you saw a few days ago, or if you had...
ago or something use that time use that time well you've got 15 minutes there it's been given to you like a gift on a plate so you could fill that 15 minutes worth of build time right to improve yourself to make yourself better to figure out you know, how to do that specific method call or work with that API or to perfect that command line command that you were going to do or whatever it might be.
And you find, I think, that when you do this, that number one, your day gets a lot more pleasurable. But you also find then that you end up almost like squeezing builds in amongst your upskilling time then. So instead of it being kind of like, now I'm just trying to find out how I can grab time.
And so far, Matt says, well, that's fine. If there's a long build, I'll just do some coding here. Instead of that, you can go to the extreme. When you really start taking the upskilling of yourself to the next level and to view it as super important, which it really is, which we'll come on to in a second, you then find...
your day almost becomes you're trying to squeeze in builds in between you upskilling yourself. Okay. But that's another way of being able to get time back. And I think this is fine, right? Because of a concept called pay yourself first. which we'll cover in a second. But the key point, though, is to always utilize the time you have in as productive a way as possible, okay? This pay-yourself-first concept. There was a book, I think it was called The Richest Man in Babylon.
And it said that the way to become rich is to adopt one simple rule. And that one simple rule is to always pay yourself first. In other words, make sure out of the money you get that you pay yourself first and then pay everybody else afterwards. Okay, that's the principle of this pay yourself first. And I completely agree with this in terms of IT. I think it's really important that you pay yourself first. with respect to taking time out of your day to upskill yourself as a priority.
you know over and above well it depends on deadlines and everything but certainly as a key priority in the day you want to upskill yourself and take this time out to get better skills to get better at your job
to learn new things and to make yourself a more valuable person in general, a more valuable employee rather. You know, so the fact that you can kind of like be upskilling yourself, right, during builds, or even if it turns out that like your upskilling period, if it's going to be longer than this 15...
minute period while you're waiting for a build if it takes just like an extra 10 minutes just to like finish this thing in my opinion it's okay right you don't have to like shrink wrap the whole process of you know developing to kind of like well the build has just taken 15 minutes and now I can instantly go on to the next part of my work
You know what? Nobody's checking up on you, right? It's perfectly okay to take an extra 10, 15 minutes, you know, whatever, sometimes even an hour, whatever it might be, just to upskill yourself. Because once you're in the zone of learning something, then you may as well, you know, kind of surf that wave and capitalise on it to fully round out the concept which you're learning about.
Okay, so I think you need to upskill yourself as a priority, you know, before you go down the same old route of like, oh, I know how to do this and doing it in that specific way that you usually do. Because our default action really as humans is to always slip into what's easy. The thing is though, growth, right? isn't they? To grow as a person and as a developer, actually as a person seemed a little bit too grandiose, okay, but to grow as a developer, or to grow in anything in fact, yeah?
You need to hit a wall of discomfort in order to break free from it. See, our default action is to slip into what's easy. But the thing is, growth isn't there, right? How you grow is by continually learning and stepping outside your default kind of easy path of doing things. So you step outside your comfort zone. And in that comfort zone, it's almost like being in a dark room. You've kind of got to find the light switch.
Right. And the light switch is like a new concept, you know, or a new skill you're learning or a new way of doing things. And then once you acquire that, right, because you stepped outside your comfort zone.
And because you specifically didn't want to do things the way you usually do things, you wanted to evolve yourself and get better. Because of that, learning that new skill, learning that new concept, it's... analogous pretty much to like you know switching on the light in that room you illuminate you know your um way of doing things and your path becomes much brighter
And because of this, you can see more of the path ahead. You know, you can make better decisions. You just generally become a more performant developer by doing this. I think it's really important that you always upskill yourself and always look to improve yourself no matter what you're doing. and now how can you evolve yeah don't always stick to what you know as i just said so always try and find new and better ways of doing things
Always try and get a little better each day. You know, you should really close off each day, maybe before you go to sleep or whatever, just by trying to think quickly like, you know, what did I achieve today which made me better? How did I get a little bit better today than I was yesterday?
And just doing that, you'll find that you become more motivated as you go on because you continually recognize. It's nice having that moment of thinking about this because it forces you to continually recognize the fact that you're getting better. And that's good. So anyway, back to the time thing. You actually have a lot of time. Okay, we've said this now. You can really fill in these dead cracks of time with useful stuff like this. And it's just about adopting the right mindset, really.
Another bonus tip is also make notes as you do things. So in order to not forget what you've learned or what you've just learned to apply or whatever, if you make notes about it, it can be really useful because it can solidify what you've learned so much more.
So to summarize, you always have more time. You just always need to question how you're using it and make the most of it in whatever way you can. So try things out. Always be on the lookout for improving yourself, improving your processes. Don't forget to jot them down because that's useful. Make notes and everything.
And you can crystallize them in a format where you can glance through your notes to refresh what's working. And you can also then as well, and kind of for posterity, see just how far you've come to, which is nice.
Always pay yourself first is the other key point here of this episode. Always, always, always pay yourself first. It's better for you, you know, career wise, because you're going to get better as a developer. And also it's better for the company as well. You're going to get things done quicker.
So you're not stealing time, as it were, from the company. Sometimes people can think, when I present this concept of like pay yourself first, you know, they can think, well, if you're taking like, you know, like up to an hour or something to learn something and you should be doing your work, why aren't you stealing time from the company? No, you're not. You're not still in time for the company. The reason being is because...
you're learning something or getting better at something, which is going to be directly in line with what you have to do anyway, in general. I mean, don't just learn something random for the sake of it. So don't just learn, for example, Android programming on work time. Then you are stealing time, obviously.
But as long as you're evolving yourself and learning skills which are useful in the company that you're working for, and you're learning about technology that you're using on the project, then there's no way you're stealing time. All you're doing is, if you think about it, you're kind of borrowing time up front, you know?
um such that you at some point down the line will be able to do a task which is related to that thing that you've learned much much quicker so you know from that point of view you're definitely not stealing time you're just looking after yourself and in this day and age we all need to look after ourselves because there's no such thing company loyalty companies sadly um you know would get rid of most people like a shop unless you're quite higher up
And even then, that's not guaranteed. So what you want to do as a developer is look after yourself, you know, make sure that you're paying yourself first, you know, you're learning things, you're developing things, you're going to have more fun along the way, and you're going to become a more valuable employee as well, which is always good for them.
Besides which as well, right, another point, companies in general, they kind of steal from you, right? So they promise you're going to get training, which you never get. They promise you courses that you never receive. They're going to promise you...
guidance with a mentor who's not particularly invested in your professional development and everything. So really, it's up to you, you know, to make the best of what you possibly can do to get yourself better. Because, you know, nobody's going to hand you things on a silver plate. There's a famous phrase, which is not a famous phrase, but it's a phrase that I like from a guy called Brian Tracy. I don't know if you got it from somewhere else, but the phrase is...
If it's to be, it's up to me. And yeah, I think that's the case. Pay yourself first. If it's to be, it's up to me. Always adopt that mindset. So that's it for this podcast episode. Until next time, happy coding and speak soon. Bye. you