eduHund

EduHund is great with its practice orientation. It is built around real-life problem-solving accompanied by just the right amount of theory. The tasks are based on real-life cases, which are provided with detailed descriptions. The grouping of tasks in plot-like structures makes solving them feel like playing a video game or reading an interactive book. For every task, you can read an author's explanation so that you can see not only what answer is correct (which is rather subjective, so you always have an option to disagree, explain why your solution is better and still get the score), but also why the authors consider it as such. In my opinion, these insights are even more fruitful than any theoretical explanations. Not only does EduHund provide you with samples, but it also constantly stimulates your reflection on your current actual work tasks. One moment you type some of your actual tasks as a response to the question, and the next moment the system asks you to analyze them, delegate them, and deliver them to the team members, considering their skills, business requirements, and project context. This is really more of a mentoring approach than just solving problems unrelated to my personal needs. Lastly, I would like to mention the style of text and visuals used in EduHund. They are engaging and often make you smile.

Raising signority in software development generally means that at some moment you get subordinates. Be it your own development team when you strive to become a team lead, or you just find that you are the most experienced person in a group that develops some chunk of functionality, you have to somehow manage them. And in most cases, while you study hard to write good code, nobody teaches you how to manage people. It's a bit like parenting: you look at your own team lead and think: "those are the mistakes I'm not going to repeat" only to repeat half of them and to make a whole bunch of your own. When I find myself in (times of trouble) this role of the most experienced developer in the team, I was unsettled. I had to learn a lot in the field where I had almost no experience. Made my share of mistakes, got my share of advice, useful and not so much. That's when I took the "Hard skills for managers" course that turned out very helpful in setting up the system to the heap of facts and practices that accumulated in my head. The taskbook is written in a light manner, easy to study and generally pleasant. A few tasks look overwhelming a bit, but aside from that, it's a good set of problems pinpointing specific areas of knowledge, with nice texts explaining things that are sometimes so obvious you do not think about them, and sometimes just require you to look at them from a different angle you never thought of taking. Is it a silver bullet? No. Do I feel more confident in this role after passing the course? Definitely yes. What do I deserve after taking it? I think, the amount of time I'll save over the year with the knowledge I got will constitute more than a week, so it's a well-earned week-long rest equally distributed over the lifetime of a project. Plus a praise for not making stupid mistakes, both from my managers and from myself.

I took two courses from eduHund. I highly appreciated the non-standard, well-thought-out, and understandable method of teaching. And I want to mention the practical exercises, which were chosen according to a special methodology and always made me think, even about the simplest task. The professionalism of the course developers is evident, as seen in the selection of exercises and course examples. The mechanics of training are very interesting and compel you to work through each lesson very carefully.

Having completed it myself and considering myself a seasoned manager, I stumbled upon more then a handful of tasks where I had to scratch my head before moving forward. It was fun! No regrets for money invested into upskilling this way. Great to see this tool available in English, so now I can recommend it to my colleagues. "Tuuld tiibadesse!" as we say in Estonia on this matter :)

I've taken a couple of courses and I really like their approach

Love their courses