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What to Learn (2021)

It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers.

I think this is actually more effective at work than it is in sports or gaming since, unlike in competitive endeavors, you don't have an opponent who will try to expose your weaknesses and force you into positions where your strengths are irrelevant. A perhaps less useless piece of advice is that, if you're having a hard time identifying what those might be, you can ask people who know you very well, e.g., my manager and Ben Kuhn independently named coming up with solutions that span many levels of abstraction as a skill of mine that I frequently apply (and I didn't realize I was doing that until they pointed it out). Thanks to Ben Kuhn, Alexey Guzey, Marek Majkowski, Nick Bergson-Shilcock, @bekindtopeople2, Aaron Levin, Milosz Danczak, Anja Boskovic, John Doty, Justin Blank, Mark Hansen, "wl", and Jamie Brandon for comments/corrections/discussion.

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