Your company has a learning budget? If you can justify it, you can spend it on cloud-hosted resources and use them to try playing with some concept that interests you, like deploying a web service or running some heavy long-running computations. I know others who have found success in courses, but I've always found it easier to dig through docs and random blog posts that show up in my search results.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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O'Reilly books were my go-to when I worked at a company that had a training budget I had to spend every year. Not hard to rack up a couple hundred dollars of book purchases.
I have had Pluralsight for many years now and I agree with you. In some cases they have excellent courses, but I sometimes find the content outdated. I plan to explore O'Reily's platform next year. They seem to have a different set of resources and are comparable in price.
Cloud, and really any vendor specific stuff, is tough to keep up with both in terms of learning and creating training materials. You're better off getting it straight from amazon, google or other practitioners. See if you can find some smaller conferences in your area, and if you can spend training budget on that.
Obviously $200 isn't much, but coursera might be a better bang for your buck than some other systems. Learning core skills will help you level up, while a lot of Udemy and similar content will just keep you on the same track you would have been on.
I would spend it on language translation basically, paying someone to translate international documentations on things that aren't documented in USA no matter where you look.
What obscure things are you working with?
That one was an old documentation that some of the Chinese folks actually document a lot of quirks related to X11 protocol. I paid about $6000 for translator to work on translating that doc to English and I use it to build my own GUI Toolkit on Linux that I still use to this day.
My company will pay student loans, so that