Hi! I’m a Java Engineer at Adyen. I have worked in tech for eight years and started at Adyen in 2019. What I love about my job is that it keeps you sharp since you never run out of things to learn, but this can also be a challenge — especially with new technologies and development trends emerging faster than anyone can keep up. Here is how I make sure to not get overwhelmed and stay on top of relevant changes in my sector.
Embrace the unknown
If you only stick to the type of work you’re familiar with, you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities – growth happens outside of comfort zones. I try to force myself to go for projects that I have little knowledge of and learn on the job. It can be hard to stay motivated and pick up a new technology if you don’t actively need to use it. This way, you see the immediate use case right from the start. Every single job I had stretched the boundaries of my knowledge and forced me to learn something new — this is how I came to learn coding and more recently, containerization, reflecting the principles found in A brief overview of how Git works.
At my job at Adyen I moved as a Java engineer to the containerization team where I got to work more closely with the Infrastructure team to containerize our webapps. It’s such an interesting field, and I am doing many things I haven’t done before – it definitely keeps me on my toes.
Dive into a variety of resources
I try as much as possible to take an honest look at my own skill set and experiences, but most importantly at what I am missing and want to learn. I outline the things I don’t know and come up with a strategy of technical write ups, video tutorials, blogs and of course asking colleagues for help. I have recently decided to go back to studying algorithms and data structures. I am also doing leetcode challenges to keep me sharp with Java, since I haven’t been doing much Java on the job lately.
Meet others and listen
Tech events or engineering meetups both Internal and external are a great way to broaden your horizon. If you only stay within your own team, you’re most likely limiting your sources of knowledge. Listening to others at events or meet-ups, makes you realise how one dimensional your own point of view can be sometimes. You need others to burst your bubble a bit, to make you see beyond the obvious and come up with completely different approaches to looking at a problem.
Teach and you will be taught
It‘s usually true that when you are able to teach something to someone else, you probably understand it yourself much better afterwards too. Teaching goes both ways; it forces me to find out more about a subject so I can provide all the facts to the people I am talking to – you can’t give what you don’t have. And through having to answer questions about the same subject again and again, you will definitely become an expert in no time. A bonus point is that it’s also a lot of fun.
Follow relevant tech news
Last but not least, making use of the vast variety of tech news magazines and channels and reading up on latest developments is another great way to stay on top of what’s happening in the industry. But make it work with your schedule and time. You don’t need to dedicate an hour each day to inform yourself through 10 different tech newspapers. Even with 5 to 10 minutes once or twice a week, you’re well equipped and know what’s going on. You can also sign up to email newsletters or listen to a podcast – build a nice routine that works for you and stick to it.
