I’ve been working a lot with TypeScript in recent years. When contracting, the language is often dependent on the project, and most of the time, tests should be written in the same language as the application. This allows for developers to participate in writing test cases when needed.

Where does this leave other languages that are not used in the projects? Things get forgotten, like anything you’ve not done for a long time. The languages and tools also evolve and improve. How to stay up-to-date?

Below, you’ll find some ways that I like to use.

Tutorials and Blog Posts

It’s always good to follow people who post news on a specific topic. You can find news in many places, for example, on LinkedIn, Twitter, BlueSky, and Medium, as well as in newsletters from websites such as dev.to or fly.io. There are also language-specific newsletters, such as JavaScript Weekly or Ruby Weekly.

Writing Blog Posts

Even better than reading blog posts, writing them is a great way to learn new things. Before publishing a post, extra care goes into making sure the details in the post are correct, leading to a much more in-depth review of the topic.

Courses

A course is often a good way to learn a new skill. One advantage of courses is that once you buy them, you get to dedicate time to going through the material by yourself, or if you’re lucky enough to attend an in-person training session, you can concentrate on the course alone for the duration. If you buy a course online, you’ll have to open the editor and write the code in an editor to learn. Just watching the material is usually not enough.

Exercism.org

If you need to improve on the skills of specific programming languages, Exercism.org is an excellent site where you can learn (currently) 76 languages. Learning the language is necessary to work with automation frameworks with said language. You’ll need to study the test automation frameworks separately, though.

Side projects

One efficient way to learn and stay up-to-date is to work on side projects. To learn programming languages, the project can be about anything. When you need to learn a new test framework, you must write tests using it.

Brush up with AI

Another great way to get up to speed on a specific language and framework for test automation is to use AI as your guide. You can ask about best practices, language features, and questions about implementing tests with it. You can verify that the coding went correctly by just running the tests.

Summary

Here are some ways I learned new things outside the project I’m currently working on. I hope you’ll find this post helpful. Feel free to ping me on LinkedIn to discuss a specific topic.