Knowledge: Use it or lose it. Now.

I have written some posts about resources you can use to improve your development skills. There’s tons of great resources out there, but I haven’t told you the secret to making them work. Without this key bit, everything I’v presented is absolutely useless. Beyond worthless.

Are you the key master?

The key to making all of the knowledge in the world useful is one thing: applying it. That’s right, if you do not actually apply the knowledge you have acquired, you have wasted your time.  Don’t get me started on the value of time and why wasting it is the worst thing you can do. Putting knowledge into action forces you to actually learn something. Anyone can read a book about programming, but can anyone actually build a website? The doing is what turns knowledge into a skill. Simply knowing will not take you very far in your career (or life for that matter).

Building skills with your knowledge

The first thing that I hear people say when I bring this up in conversations is, “But I don’t know what to build!”. To that I answer “Build anything”. For me, I usually have a few notes laying around of things that would be cool to have. For example, a service that will send you a text if there is going to be bad weather on a certain spot on your way home. That example is so vague it could encompass a lot of different things when it comes to development. Normally in a business this is a very bad thing. But for a personal project, this is great! Now you have a million things you could do, and most of them are great candidates for applying your new knowledge. For me, I recently started a course in modern front end design techniques. Its a nice little course, but how do I make sure I’m actually learning and not just watching videos? I decided to take the lessons and apply them to re-doing my personal website. This worked out well, I was able to give the site a technical facelift and apply some of the lessons I learned. The end result is I now have something sitting in a repository that can show how I took a django static website and turned it into a gulp/javascript static website.

GO FORTH AND DO.

So to wrap up: doing > knowing. Go out there and show the world that you know something by doing something.