This was done 2 years ago. Why the lack of technical updates? I've worked in more corporate settings in the last ~2 years, where I've honed more than just product and tech. I've learned more perspectives and mindsets that I didn't have (or refused to think were helpful): business thinking, looking at ecosystems and working within them, partnerships.
Here's where I put up some of the sample code I've written as a result of learning to code.
I'm a Product Manager, and I've worked in the game industry and the enterprise technology industry doing QA, business development, game production, product management, team management and some UX work.
Initially, I wasn't technical - I graduated with a degree in Psychology. Everything I know now about building products, I learned on my own - via asking, reading, and doing.
Here are some technical things I've learned over the years (in order from first to last):
- What FTP is and how to use an FTP client
- SVN and version control
- The difference between data and code, which helped me identify bugs and write bug reports easily early on in my career
- Scripts help automate the boring things - our programmers were able to build our games, upload them, and post them on Basecamp via scripts without staying up late to finish that
- Pros and cons to using Git vs SVN
- Wireframing is the term for what I've been doing prior to game production work
- Prototyping tools are amazing, but usually means you need good visual designs
- HTML5 and CSS, using Bootstrap (but I'd really rather not do front-end coding)
- Differences between iOS and Android behaviors, including but not limited to - gathering logs (TestFlight vs logcat), multitasking, multi-touching
- Computer science basics (bits, bytes, 1s and 0s)
- Programming requires different mindsets - making games is different from making web services and is different from making tools. I learned to respect that and not just generalise "Oh you're a programmer, so you can do X, Y, Z?"
- Python, just enough to get me to understand some code
- Swift, just enough to get me to write those small lesson apps in the repo
- Product documentation in the form of specs can be very, very helpful
- Payloads and formats people use - JSON, XML and how they're parsed by clients
- Reading PHP code (because I didn't want to bother our engineers)
- There is such an argument as REST vs SOAP (though others say they shouldn't be put against each other, because it's like apples vs oranges)
- Back-end architectures (monolith vs microservices)
- How database and UI design affect API design
- SQL is an awesome way of pulling data to analyse it; in the right hands, it's more efficient than a spreadsheet because of the logic that can go into it