Happy Team's self development in 2016

5+ Programme" is designed to support our self-development at Happy Team. Basically, we add 5PLN to the hourly rate of every employee and it is up to each person to decide how to spend this money. We started this in April 2016 so there has now been 9 months of putting away money for our self-development. What sorts of ideas have we supported with 5+?

Courses

First of all, we bought various online courses with this money. The things we touched vary from Elixir, iOS, React+Redux to business related advice like "Double Your Freelancing" and English lessons.

• Pluralsight subscription
• Frontend Masters subscription
• Take Off With Elixir (Elixir video course)
• "Advanced React and Redux" at Udemy
• "The Complete React Native and Redux" at Udemy
• "The Complete iOS 10 Developer Course - Build 21 Apps" at Udemy
• "MacOS Programming for iOS Developers - Apps for the Desktop!" at Udemy
• "Double Your Freelancing" Course
• MP3's with business English
• English lessons
• videos from a conference "DYFConf"

Workshops

In addition to online courses, it's good to attend a workshop at which you can talk to a trainer and ask questions. Sometimes they are part of a conference so that there's hands-on knowledge in addition to regular conference talks. Workshops can bring much more knowledge in a short period of time. They're great to speed up learning of a particular subject.

• "Internet of Things - Build It" at DevDay
• "React+Redux" at DevDay
• "Elixir Basics Workshop" at ElixirLive workshops
• "Production Debugging Techniques for Elixir" at ElixirLive
• CSS workshop

Conferences

Conferences are a great way to learn and share experience with others. Happy Team members organise conferences but they also attend them. Here are some conferences which had some costs covered by our self-development programme.

• leetspeak
• Øredev
• ElixirLive
• LambdaDays (not happened yet but tickets are already bought!)

Books

Books are endless sources of knowledge. We buy and read software development and business related books to develop ourselves. This list will grow in size for sure!

• Safari Books subscription
• Functional Swift
• Advanced Swift
• The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook
• Programming Elixir 1.2
• Exercises for Programmers
• The Imposter's Handbook
• Take Off With Elixir
• #NoEstimates
• JavaScript: the Good Parts
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• Smart and Gets Things Done
• Hackers & Painters
• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
• Team Geek
• Smart Income for Developers bundle
• Functional Concurrency in .NET
• Rework
• The Lean Startup

Other

There is one more surprising item that was paid for by our 5+ programme - music, it's supposed to enhance coding skills. We're still testing to see if it really helps. So far so good!

• Music to code by

The above lists only include the things we had to pay for in 2016. There are multiple other ways of self-development which are usually free. We highly recommend those too:

• Reading blogs
• Attending meetups (like dev@LDZ)
• Having your own pet projects
• Attending conferences at which you're speaking (like Kuba spoke at CodeEurope)
• Attending conferences which you organise (like DevDay)
• Organising a Developer day to learn new things
• Other forms of practising like "deliberate practice".

We are dedicated to self-development at Happy Team because the IT industry changes so fast and we love learning new things. You will find a lot of technologies on the list which we don't use daily. It doesn't mean we won't be using them in the future. We want to be prepared!