Comment by chaosharmonic

Most of my knowledge of new tools comes from newsletters, forums, and content creators. I find things through passive media consumption (and, where I can get it, discourse with other enthusiasts) more often than I find them in the course of trying to solve specific problems.

But not all managers think that your learning sources are valid, and care more that you spend time on their learning paths. Even if it's your off time.

(Yes, there is a story attached to this haha... and more importantly, several different writeups[1][2][3] on how random internet wanderings have been more beneficial to my overall technological capability than people who insist on the importance of a CS background when building dashboards and client UIs. In practice, thanks to a dev box with insufficient RAM, and your typical tabbed-browsing problem, I used `pkill` over `ssh` -- something I picked up from toying with Over the Wire levels in my off time -- a lot more often than I used linked lists at that job.)

[1] bhmt.dev/blog/scraping

[2] bhmt.dev/blog/ctf

[3] bhmt.dev/blog/feeds