Let’s do a quick update this week. I went through a couple of short courses on Pluralsight. One covered using Swagger to document a ASP.NET Core API and the other discussed using GatsbyJS to build a basic static website. Both courses were watched at 2x speed as I was auditing the material. My thoughts on the first course is that Swagger makes it easy to document a REST based API. The Gatsby course provided a nice overview of the platform, I’d recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the subject.

I read Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. The book is fantastic. I’ve heard a lot about it before but had never read it until now. The book breaks down the idea that are there are two mindsets: fixed and growth. In the fixed mindset people believe that they are what they are and cannot change. In the growth mindset people believe that through effort we can change. Many of the outcomes in life are determined by whether we have a fixed or a growth mindset. The main idea of the book is to cultivate a growth mindset in order to get the most out of your capabilities. This book was a perfect validation of the concept of Dev-eryday. There’s no finished product and we can always stand to get better.

Finished

Online Course(s): Documenting an ASP.NET Core API with OpenAPI/Swagger, GatsbyJS: Getting Started

Book(s): Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Currents

Online Course(s): Dependency Injection in ASP.NET Core

Book(s): The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts, Programming on Purpose

On the Next…

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about learning impractical versus practical things. Specifically, spending time learning an unpopular programming language that contains a lot of new or exotic ideas, think F# or Elixir, versus doubling down on existing skills by going deeper on C# or JavaScript. I know that there is value in both but which is more valuable? I want to explore this over the coming weeks. It’d be interesting to do a long-term exploration of one of these kinds of programming languages followed by a deep dive back into a daily type language. How would the code you write in the business-friendly language change with the new ideas? I don’t know if I’ll find the answer by this time next week, but I’m going to be thinking more on it.