Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. I'm your host and today I'm taking on a few questions from a listener named Eric. Eric is from New York, New York, as he'll tell you in the question that he sent in. He was kind enough to send in an audio question and in fact he sent in two audio questions and I'll be going over both of them today. The first one has to do with how to keep up with the news and here it goes. Hi Jonathan, this is Eric Connolly from New York, New York calling with a question. How do you keep up with the latest news? Thanks and keep up the great work. So Eric's question is, I'm going to take it from the angle of how do you keep up with the latest development news, but this really goes for most news types. Of course, there are plenty of different outlets for news. You have indie news outlets, but then you have also the larger news outlets. For development specifically, every once in a while I'll get on Hacker News. I'll browse through some of those links and why is that? That seems like such an obvious answer, but the reason I get on Hacker News is because there are a lot of very smart developers hanging around Hacker News. It is a valuable resource. Now I will say that for a while I was going to Hacker News and it was sort of depressing for some reason. I can't quite put my finger on why exactly it was depressing. I think it was maybe the tone that some of the community had there and perhaps it has changed. So don't let my experience with Hacker News deter you from going and checking it out. Of course, it could have been something just inside of me. I might have been just an experiencing chemical depression for a couple of days or something like that. So don't let my experience deter you. Go and check out Hacker News because it is a great way to keep up on absolutely the latest things. The top page usually is something that was released either that day or it's commentary on something that was released. The commentary is almost always really current. So go check it out. To clarify, Hacker News is actually news.ycombinator.com. Y Combinator is a startup. Whatever you call it. Startup incubator started by Paul Graham. Tons of very successful startups have gone through Y Combinator, but the community on Hacker News is far larger than Y Combinator. They're arguably one of the first to do what Hacker News does. And in fact, Y Combinator is actually responsible for Reddit, which is another resource, but one that I don't commonly use. And I couldn't even tell you why I don't use it all that often, other than to say that I've known a lot of people who have used Reddit and they've gotten kind of sucked in, and it seems to be a productivity killer for them. So I've avoided that just because I want to protect my productivity. And ultimately, staying up with the news, and this is really the advice I have to give you, Eric, and listeners of the show, staying up with the news, to me is not as valuable as staying focused. Staying up to date with whatever the latest thing that has come out or is happening in the open source world. While there's some value there, and you certainly shouldn't just completely ignore the open source world, I think if you have a project in front of you, and you're trying to stay up with the news and work on that project, it's going to be difficult to devote enough time to both to be able to say that you are, you know, adequately staying up with the news. Now, there are some really good resources, really just practical ones that I'll include in the show notes, but there's some weekly emails that are sent out by some really good curators, like rubyweekly.com, for example, is one. Peter Cooper, he started a company called Cooper Press, and they actually send out weeklies for JavaScript and HTML and just a lot of really good content there. There's constantly new things popping up. So if you listen to this episode, like in a year from now, the landscape almost certainly has changed. In fact, I'd say the landscape changes on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. So there's not really any one good shot at keeping up with the news. Another interesting way of handling this, though, is to follow the people who are leading in this industry. So, you know, Twitter lists are a good way to handle this problem. If you just go and follow people who are doing things in the industry, you might want to create a list. I haven't done this, but I know a lot of people who have, and they've had pretty good success with being able to determine what type of news they want to read for that day. And then just going to their Twitter list feed. So people who are tweeting new things about JavaScript, for example, you can put them in your JavaScript list. People who are tweeting new things related to, I don't know, GitHub. And continuous integration might would be tweeting about something else. So put those people in their respective lists, and then you would have a relatively condensed way of looking at news that is kind of a minute to minute and usually link rich place to look for news. Now, I also visit Designer News because I find that a lot of the resources that I want to be updated about, I talk about them on Designer News as well. But Designer News is more geared towards designers. So there's a lot of branding talk and that kind of thing. But I think that everybody who's listening to this podcast, I think you should be interested in that to some extent, or at least aware of it to some extent. You may not be interested in it, but you need to be aware of it to an extent that is reasonable to keep you up to date. with what is going on in the full stack world. Even if you aren't a full stack developer, it makes sense to have some sort of awareness. Now, that's not true for everyone across the board. In fact, nothing that I'm saying in this episode is true for everyone. You have to decide what news is applicable to you based on what it is that you're trying to stay updated about. So perhaps you just need to have only news about one framework for the next little while, or whatever. Then follow that framework and get email updates whenever they update their blog, or maybe even set up a Google Alert. This is another great way to stay up to date with the latest articles that are posted, the latest news that's posted about a given keyword. I'm going to take a quick sponsor break here to talk about Codeship. And then we'll jump into the second question from Eric. 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This will be in the show notes, so check it out there as well. So Eric's next question is about formal education. Let's take a listen to what he has to ask. As a developer, how can I decide when or if I should get a graduate degree? Thanks. So Eric is wondering if and when should he get a graduate degree? Now, I have a graduate degree. We've talked about education so much on this show. If you haven't heard those episodes, they're near the very beginning of developer T history. So go back and check it out. I talked to Nick and Cody, my designer friends, about the value of their design degrees. I haven't really talked about my experience with my master's program. I actually got my master's degree at Georgia Tech, and I did it in digital media. I got my undergrad degree in communications at a small liberal arts college in Tennessee. And I'm very thankful that I did both of these things, but I can't say that it's a one-shot solution. For everyone, it's kind of a difficult and complex conversation and one that doesn't have a clean answer. But I'm going to try to give you as good of a idea towards an answer that I can. The first thing that you should know is that whatever you get your degree in, if you do decide to go and get a degree, that doesn't mean that you absolutely have to work in that field. I started out as a music major. I then went on to journalism. I thought I might want to do reporting of some or writing journalism. And then I decided that I wanted to move more into advertising communications. And I could pull from knowledge from all of those different areas in my job today, and I do. I regularly pull from all of those different areas, all of the knowledge from those things. I am not even remotely working for a news organization, though. That's not even a part of my job at all. In fact, I'm also not working for an advertising agency. So even if you were to go and get a degree in, I don't know, underwater basket weaving, as I've mentioned on the show before, that doesn't mean that you have to absolutely be an underwater basket weaver for the rest of your life. Your degree will teach you more than just that specific skill. With that said, there are some degrees that are a little bit more specific than others. So choosing wisely is certainly not a bad idea. For example, if you go to school for years and years to become a doctor, then it's kind of difficult for you to step back and say, I guess I don't want to be a doctor anymore. I want to do something entirely different. Because you've invested a lot of time and money in that degree, and there's a lot of skills that are very specific to being a doctor that you can't really port over into other places. Of course, again, there are no barriers here. If you did go to school to be a doctor and you decide that you want to be a web developer, the door is wide open for that. For web development and for development in general, software development, whatever you want to call it, the door is open even wider. And the reason for that is because the people who are teaching about web development are also usually web developers. And a lot of that content is already available online. Open source is a very important and productive thing for learning, especially if you are learning about how to create things that are open source, especially if you're learning about how to create things that are open source. How to create software, right? There are so many resources online. So the actual material that you might would encounter at any graduate program is likely available online. However, the thing that isn't available online necessarily are the human interactions that you will have if you go and are a part of that particular program. So making a decision about whether or not you should go to a graduate program, in my opinion, there are two major concerns that you should keep in mind. The first one is, do you want to do it? It's very simple. Do you have a desire to hold a master's degree? I personally, this is my main driving factor in going to get my master's degree. It wasn't because I was looking at a job that had some sort of requirement for a master's level of education. And in fact, the job that I ended up taking after I got out, which is the one I'm at now, they, uh, actually would have preferred that I go ahead and go straight to the job. They wanted me on the job immediately. Uh, so my master's degree definitely was a personal choice. It was a personal life goal that I had set out to achieve. And if you have that personal life goal, then I would recommend that you look into trying to find ways to make that happen. I think that a master's degree is definitely a worthwhile pursuit for those of you who want one. Now it is very rewarding to walk away from a master's degree and to be able to do something that you want to do. And I think that's a very important part of the process. I think that's a very important part of the process. I think that's a very important part of the process. I think that's a very important part of the process. I think that's program and say that you actually accomplished that thing. And it's certainly worth mentioning that some employers will offer you different positions because you have a master's degree that otherwise you wouldn't be offered. There are a lot of things that go along with getting a higher level education, whether that's a college degree like an undergraduate degree or a graduate degree that will help your career in the long run. People look at your degrees and just culturally, we appreciate those things because they mark an accomplishment that you have made in life. So if you really want to achieve that thing in life, that is a huge consideration that you shouldn't ignore, in my opinion. The second thing that you should consider is the people, whether or not you would be able to have similar experiences and learn from the people who you would be learning from in a master's degree. And if that particular experience and those particular people are working, they may be able to help you in your career. So if you really want to achieve that thing the investment that it takes to go and be a part of that degree program. It's not cheap to go into graduate school. Luckily for students, there are a lot of teacher's assistant programs and research assistant programs that will provide money to a student for the work that they're doing and the help that they provide and the research that they're actually executing. But it is very possible that you won't get that help, that you will go into your graduate program without an assistantship and not be able to gain an assistantship. There are so many things that go into that assistantship, being able to pay for your education. So consider whether or not it is worth it to you because the only things really that you can't get that you would get in a graduate program, the only things that you can't get outside of that graduate program are the personal experiences with the people that you're around and the actual degree itself. The proof that you finished that program and the validation that you have is going to be a lot more valuable than the actual degree itself. The foundation that that provides both to yourself and to other people who you might come in contact with. Choosing to go to a graduate program in order to learn content that otherwise you think you may not be able to learn, most of that content is available online and most of it is accessible in some format, especially for software development. Some of the most prestigious programs provide their content online through things like iTunes U or Coursera. And in fact, there's even real full-on graduate programs that you can attend entirely online, which basically has you avoiding going to class on campus somewhere. And Georgia Tech, for example, actually provides one of these in computer science. So there's a wide spectrum of options available. If all you're looking for is the content, there are a wide spectrum of much cheaper options, generally speaking, than if you are actually wanting to get the degree and have the human interaction, experiences that you might would have if you were to go and attend those classes and be under the leadership of those professors. That is a huge, valuable thing. And the things that you learn in those human interaction moments are definitely valuable and they can't necessarily be easily replicated online in just an online environment. I won't say that that's always going to be the case, especially with the coming age of education being more and more and more and more and more online and how much virtual reality has advanced is very likely that you will be able to attend class entirely virtually and it will be as if you are there in many respects. So I won't say that those human interactions will never be possible online and that the value that you would get from those human interactions isn't always going to be unavailable to you if you take them only online. But I will say that for now, that is the case in many ways. So don't underestimate the value of that human interaction, of that connection that you would make with those people if you were to actually go to those classes on campus. I hope this has helped answer some of the questions that Eric has, as well as all of you listeners. I really appreciate you listening to this show. I absolutely love these kinds of conversations. I hope this conversation sparks debate amongst all of the listeners. Please, please reach out on Twitter. If you have any questions, please reach out to me on Twitter. I'm Eric. I'll see you next time. Have any thoughts about this? You can mention me at at developer T or you can email me at developer T at gmail.com. If you have any further thoughts on on this formal education conversation, this is going to be one that never closes. We're never going to end it because it's going to become more and more complex. Learning is a subject that we will all continuously be learning about. We learn about learning on this show, and I hope that you've seen that come true. Eric, thank you so much for sending in your question. And everyone else, please send me your questions. Thank you so much for listening to developer T. As I said previously, you can contact me on Twitter at at developer T. You can email me at developer T at gmail.com. And the show notes for this episode will be available at developer T.com. If you're enjoying developer T, please go and leave a review in iTunes. This is the best way to help other developers just like you find developer T. And if this show is providing value to you, please leave a comment below. And if you enjoyed this show, please leave a comment below. Please consider giving back to the show by going to developer T.com front slash donate. Even the smallest amount is a huge deal to me. And I see every single person who decides to donate to the show. I actually get an alert directly on my phone if you decide to donate to developer T. Thank you so much. And until next time, enjoy your tea.