My Top 10 Things To Learn in 2020

My Top 10 Things To Learn in 2020

Okay. I’m an academic, so I love learning new things, but it should be part of your world too. A healthy and active mind is one of the best ways to keep yourself healthy overall.

Our life should be built around us continually learning, and never sitting back on our knowledge. So let 2020 be the year that you pushed yourself forward and learn something new within our digital world. If possible, try and avoid just surface learning, and properly understand the foundation principles of new ways of thinking. It is so easy to sit back and criticise new methods, without actually delving into them and seeing their potential for yourself.

Our world is changing, and there are some things that will transform our understanding of our digital world. So here are my Top 10 things to learn in 2020:

1. Build new worlds in GitHub. I have transformed the platform I used in my teaching by using GitHub to deliver the content, rather than using the clunky Moodle platform. To me, Moodle seems like it was made for the 20th Century, and GitHub gives me a platform where I can more easily control and maintain my content, and in not locking it away behind a firewall. So go and learn how to use Git properly, and see how it can transform our world.
2. Learn Overleaf (and LaTeX) and dump Word. One on-line package that has completely changed our outputs, our collaboration, and our productivity is Overleaf. It is an online system for producing beautifully formatted documents, and which do maths and layout properly. But its real power is the way that teams can collaborate on documents, without needing only one person to work on it at a time. All of our researchers and MSc students now use it, and, in the end, they produce documents which can be easily reviewed and commented on, and which are formatted that best represents them. For some reason many fail to see how to properly structure a document in Word and the template methods just do not work well.
3. Be open with your knowledge. We can all contribute to this amazing learning environment, so go and create your own blog. Some people might not like what you say, but, for others, it may be the spark that moves their thinking forward. So, learn about Medium.com or how to post on LinkedIn, but watch out for what people are interested in, and try not to affend anyone.
4. Go Learn Crypto! I see encryption in the same way as Ohm’s Law is seen in electrical engineering. It should be the foundation layer of cybersecurity, but generally, it is one of the weakest areas, and where many struggles to get past the definitions of the acronyms. So, go and learn about public-key encryption, and hashing, and symmetric key encryption, and digital signing … in fact there’s an endless number of things to learn. The magic moment will hit you when you say … “Ah, I get this!”. As a starter, perhaps, go and learn the beauty — and simplicity — of the RSA method.
5. Believe in Data. The future will be built on data, and Cybersecurity is probably one of the largest consumers of data. So go and learn Splunk or Elastic. But remember that you need to learn the basics of networking, protocols, and services. Also learn a bit about RegEx and a bitof maths, such as for the Bayesian method.
6. Once you’ve learnt Python, go learn Golang. I fall back to Python as my default, and, for me, it is like the pocket calculator for computer science. But, for writing fast and robust code, it is not quite there. The “pip install” technio for installing libraries can break things, and the Python 2.7 v Python 3.7 engines do not quite help in creating standard code. I also do not like the code syntax, but it is so powerful, that its usefulness overcomes its weaknesses. So my No 1 tip is to learn Golang. With Go, it feels like I am back when I started to learning programming, but also so modern. It overcomes all those DLL problems, by just downloading its code GitHubs. And the great thing for me is that it compiles to an executable program.
7. Learn about the beauty of Elliptic Curves. These beautiful little curves (y²=x³+ax+b) are just taking over the world of cybersecurity just now, and as RSA becomes increasingly more difficult to process, elliptic curves are there to take over in the creation of our secure tunnels, key exchanges, and so many other things.
8. Read more research papers and learn to continually innovate. I have a worry that my knowledge will eventually age, and that it become redundant. So one way is to get hold of the latest research and try and consume it. Some of the papers will go no-where, but others will open up new areas. When you read them, go and grab the related code, and try to get it running. Also try to simplify things, and make your own little prototypes. If you can, too, go and try and explain it to others. Try to learn how to question things and look to innovate yourself, and encourage others around you to do the same. The best album that REM ever made was created when they all swapped their instruments. Every great thing started with an idea. Don't sit back, go innovate!
9. Fall in love with maths. For some reason, many people get switched-off with maths, or don’t see it as relevant in any way to their job. But the way we learn mathematical approaches, and the way we can make sense of complex things, can help up cope with the ever increasing complexity of cybersecurity. So, go and feed your brain!
10. Challenge yourself to learn. Go and do that PhD or MSc you always wanted to do, and you will — hopefully — not regret it. While you may be comfortable with your current knowledge, education can open up a whole new way of looking at things. We all have gaps in our knowledge, so go and plug them.

And, of course, learn JavaScript, the command line, network protocols, AWS Cloud, data science, services, API integration, Kubernettes, and all the other amazing things that are rebuilding our world.

Conclusions

There you go! That was my Top 10 tips. We increasingly live in a world of surface learning, so go and be a true expert in something and learn it deeply. Dont end up being a ‘jack of all trades and master of none’.

What will your Top 10 things to learn in 2020 be? Remember don’t just surface learn …