How do I learn?

Learning is very important. Companies dont pay attention on this. All training activities are so old fashion and people are wasting a lot of create skills because people are just working but they are nor learning.

So this is the first thing to me, work is about learning if you are not learning you are not working you are just being a machine and belive me a bad one because machines can do better repetitive task them us.  There are always a chance to learn something, the problem is that people dont make time to this, instead they are always using the same old tools and approaches. Because is easy an often people feel good to be in the comfort zone, i few awful if i dont learn something new every week actually i got sick.

We are here to Learn

IMHO we are in life to learn, no matter if is thought the easy or the hardest way we gonna learn no matter what, you could learn from the suffering but we learn, today i looking to learn with less suffering i can, i dont control it, actually we control nothing in this life, control is an illusion.

If you learn you make it better, if you share and teach what you learned, even better. knowledge was made to be private. Imagine if that was true, we would be in a harder spot as human kind. I see people that are afraid to share what they know, i`m not one of that, i share stuff, i can share everything and not be afraid and i can say that for 3 reasons:

1. I`m always studying, so always learning new stuff
2. I great to help someone, is one of the best rewards you can get on this life, is help the others.
3. When you share/teach you learn more from the other rather then keeping for you

What i do? There is mix of things...

I learn from multiples sources and ways, so i do some random things like, google images, slide share and code repositories. Sometimes i type stuff like: Agile on google images and look for schemas and explanations of stuff that call my attention. I do the same with slideshare, sometimes i type stuff like: Lean and what some presentation to see what i found.

Also like to go to amazon website and check books i like for instance, software architecture, or leadership and them i use a lot the recommendation system it always give me good choises :-)

For github and code repositories is the same i look what frameworks i can found there. This 3 stupid things is great to have inspiration and start. So this is part of my learning radar/ :-)

Twitter and Prismatic

I do have interest in many things, check my prismatic for instance: http://preview.getprismatic.com/profile/diegopacheco/interests
so i love prismatic now a days it give me lots of insights and stuff to read, besides that i use a lot twitter and i try to follow people that have things i like as well.

For twitter and prismatic i just have cool stuff, i keep the bulshit for facebook btw face book is just for bullshit and talk to friends, not even think about learning from facebook is a very bad idea(so poor of content).

On twitter i use a lot of lists: https://twitter.com/diego_pacheco/lists

Continuous Learning

Here is where i use discipline and try to study and learn every damm week. I change my learnings in some categories, so i dont do just 1 thing to learn, i do several like:


  • Read Books on Paper: Check some on Good Reads.
  • Read Books on Kindle
  • Code: test frameworks, libs and languages: https://github.com/diegopacheco/Diego-Pacheco-Sandbox
  • I take lots of notes, basically i use a physical note book
  • I take more notes than you think i use the iphone notes app
  • Yes i take notes i use evernote as well
  • I what videos at: Infoq, StrangeLoop on youtube, etc..
  • I talk to people (a lot) (a lot about ideas)
  • I think while walk
  • I fail and i try to make lessons learned
  • I do retrospectives for every damm kind of event i do.
  • I ask for feedback.
Learning Board

I have a learning board on trello where i keep trace of some of the most important stuff to me.



Here are just continuous activities. So on subjects of interest is the areas of stuff i1m more interested in learning now, so for me currently is: Functional Programing, Stream + Big Data(Most Hadoop and Spark), Organizational Learning(Change, Org, Culture, Behavior, Teams) and Samba/Pagode yes brazilian music :-)

On languages i have the languages and frameworks i`m talking a look now is: java 8, angular/node and play framework. Them i have things i do in my house and things i do outside of my house. So for stuff outside my house i do: singing classes, gym, running and buy stuff for my house. For my house stuff we have: Blogging(Of course), Read Books, Watch series and play video games.

Engagement is my work around the community. Basically events i create or goto give lectures, dojos, unconference lts, lts, hackathons, etc...

I dont do all this stuff every week, but most i do, i would say 90% is weakly. Sometimes is just a little bit but it does not matter what matter is keep doing and keep learning. :-)

Its a lot of fun :D

Cheers,



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