Ask HN: How should I spend my annual prof. dev budget? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How should I spend my annual prof. dev budget?

13 pointssoftwaredoug11 comments

I’ve got a few hundred or so in professional development budget that goes away at the end of the year.

I work in machine learning, search, recommender systems. I frankly get more value “doing” (and failing a lot) than books, courses, and the like. Though of course there are notable exceptions. Usually they are the top 1-5% of books in terms of quality to hold my attention.

I’m a principal engineer. Leadership is another area I could spend money in as professional dev.

I’m at a loss.

So I thought I’d ask the Internet. Don’t stress about whether it’s going to don’t into the letter of the law, I’m just interested in some unique ideas folks may have.

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You could consider an annual O’Reilly subscription if you don’t have access to one through your role.

They have large library of books and videos, and I have found it useful to skim interesting parts of relevant books as things come up over the course of the year. They also have live sessions which span technical and nontechnical topics. I liked Curtis Newbold’s live session on leadership communication.

What’s nice is you’ll enjoy the benefits all year unlike other materials which are often one-and-done.

I did the glasgow Haskell course one year with mine to learn something outside my comfort area. On the assumption you have a comfort area no matter what it is, try learning something outside it, and refresh the learning-is-hard muscle.

I'm contemplating David Beazley's classes: (http://dabeaz.com/raft.html)

O'Reilly like mentioned below. Lots of great content besides books.

And Pluralsight: https://www.pluralsight.com/ - Get the Premium plan if you have the money for it

Udemy Business is overpriced for sure, but nice alternative to Pluralsight

I'm currently enrolled in a reinforcement learning course. It's worth every penny!

https://joindeltaacademy.com/

I can’t find the pricing anywhere on their page, would you mind sharing that? Also what has your experience being vs other random tutorials?

I believe the intro course is $24.99 for 4 weeks.

The course has 16 people enrolled spread across the world. During the week you read tutorials and complete exercises. Over the weekend you and your partner let your trained agents compete at a game in a tournament style competition. This week it's Othello.

The course material is top notch and you have office hours each week to discuss with the folks running the course.

Other courses either don't have this peer to peer interaction or run for too long.

Even though its been a lot of work to go through this course, I can't recommend it more!

*$24.99 per week for 4 weeks.

IEEE and ACM memberships are a good choice; the orgs run good journals and good conferences.

Something open source related?

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