Should I learn a new framework this year?

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There’s a saying — the best time to go on a diet is the first six weeks of the year. Why? That’s the time when you just made a new year resolution to diet. You are pumped up and ready to go.

When the excitement goes down, though, so does your resolution. It’s back to our old ways.

Now we’re into 2022, and you might be thinking about something just as ambitious — this is the year I would like to get into coding. Let’s learn a new language or a framework!

For myself, there’s a lot I could take on this year. I have been looking enviously at s(Casp) and Rules as Code. I’ve been reading up on scrapy, and I am ready to go with my grand scraping project. Maybe level up my data science knowledge with Keras or Tensorflow. Or maybe stop skirting around Git and master it this time.

However, learning shiny new things requires effort and time investment. Can you master your new programming language or framework enough to be good at it?

Lawyers learning to code is like a dreadful home cook who wants to become mildly competent in a kitchen doing the full time residential Cordon Bleu Grand Diplôme https://t.co/bt0uoUCt35

— Jack Shepherd (@jackwshepherd) January 4, 2022

In my previous post, I suggested that it’s more beneficial for coders to law than for lawyers to code. Whichever way you think (and my observation is that lawyers who can code tend to view coding as not crucial for lawyers), it isn’t easy to code and law at the same time on your own. Any serious project will probably need some collaboration. Your partners are either excellent at coding or good at lawyering, but rarely both.

So what do you need? It’s the ability to communicate that you appreciate the skill or the area. For coding, that’s knowing how software is developed, the state of the art, and the realms of possibility and impossibility.

To do that, you’d need a natural curiosity and tenacity in exploring the world of code and software. Somehow, you will have to try your hand at coding. Would you be a master coder? Probably not.

In last week's post, I overcame a roadblock – I figured out a way to use SQL. Last year, this wouldn't have been possible because the SQLModel library was only published recently. SQL might be almost as I am, but it can learn some new tricks. You can too.

Let’s Play With SQLModelProcrastinating learning SQL prevented me from using one of the world’s best databases. With SQLModel, I learnt to stop worrying about SQL and enjoy programming with it.Love.Law.Robots.HoufuNew post last week! In 2022, I will be expanding my palette with long articles I don’t email and emails I don’t long...

So, don’t let this debate about whether lawyers need to learn how to code dampen your curiosity. Unlike dieting, that six weeks of effort can be an experience of a lifetime.

Here’s to a good 2022 ahead!

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Love.Law.Robots. – A blog by Ang Hou Fu