Donny Wals is an iOS Engineer at Disney Streaming Services, who is passionate about finding new ways to level up and stay relevant as a dev. Like any developer, however, he knows that this can be overwhelming because there is so much to learn out there. Having been faced with this his entire career, the most important lesson that Donny has learned is that almost all software applications are built upon foundational blocks – and, when overwhelmed with options, these are the most useful things to learn. By focusing on understanding these core, underlying principles, Donny has developed a much stronger knowledge base, which makes learning newer applications easier.

In this article, Donny shares how he learns these foundational principles by reading old software books, as well as how he applies what he learns practically by setting open goals and blogging about his lessons.

Watch the video and read the blog post here! (https://bit.ly/3joEm5Z)

-------------------------

🤔 Curious to know how developers feel about working from home and the 'remote revolution'? Download our Developers Remote Work Report 2020 here! (https://bit.ly/3joTIaC)

-------------------------

Books Donny mentioned in the episode:

• The Mythical Man-Month (1975) by Fred Brooks
• Design Patterns (1994) by Erich Gamma, John Vlissides, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson
• The Pragmatic Programmer (1999) by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
• The Clean Coder (2011) by Robert Cecil Martin