pluralsight logo Like many developers around the world I have a subscription to Pluralsight, an online service that provides high quality training courses for Software Developers (and many other professions/skills).

However, unlike many other developers and despite having a couple of decades of development experience behind me, I don’t shy away from the courses marked as Beginner.

I know that many will think these courses as being beneath them but while some of the material may be fairly basic for me there is always something to learn, even if it’s ‘just’ how to explain something to a more junior developer. Sometimes there is a small pearl of wisdom that the instructor just throws out there, not really part of the subject matter but a personal preference or a useful utility that I hadn’t heard about before.

Recently I was watching a short 2 hour course on ‘Angular Forms’ by Mark Zamoyta where he used an online utility called PutsReq to stand up a temporary API endpoint to allow him to create his form, POST the data and handle the response – all without actually having to flash up Visual Studio (other IDEs are available) and create a local WebAPI to target.

Now, there may well be other similar utilities out there and some may well be better – but Mark felt that this was good enough to do the job at hand and demonstrated how to use it.

I’m currently watching ‘Building a Web App with ASP.NET Core, MVC, Entity Framework Core, Bootstrap and Angular’ by Shaun Wildermuth. This is also a beginners course and he does start off by explaining HTML, CSS and Javascript at a pretty basic level. But .NET Core is still pretty new and sometimes it’s good to sit back and watch someone who has taken the hit to wire all thses things together.

While I consider myself competent in .NET, C#, MVC and WebAPI I am still on the Angular learning curve and fully admit that my CSS is somewhat shaky. Having watched some of Shawn’s other courses I’m pretty confdent that I will come out of this 9 hour course better equipped for what lays ahead.

Above I mentioned that I have over 20 years experience, I think it is important to ensure that it not the same 20 years!

Even now in my early 50s I want (need?) to evolve as a developer, keep up with the ever advancing technologies, to learn new skills that I can use day to day.

In the past I watched many courses by the late K Scott Allen and always gained more that the course title suggested. With over 50 courses to his name there is something for everyone in his back catalog even if you’re not a .NET developer. It’s true that many of his courses are being ‘retired’ now but many of us are still supporting legacy systems so just because it isn’t new and shiny doesn’t mean it’s obsolete.

So, whether I’m polishing my existing skills, learning new ones or improving my ability to explain the basics – I’ll still be watching Beginner courses on Pluralsight and I advise you to do the same.