Your Selfhost Learning Channel

When you are a software developer, you are always building new things. You are creating completely new features for existing products, adding enhancements or fixes to things that already exist, or are making something completely new. You trust your work…mostly. But aren’t trusting it enough to share with the world. The same applies for your skills. When we are learning a new skill there is still the same need to keep that only to yourself at first to make sure that you are comfortable with the skill and evaluate it before you take it any further.

The Selfhost channel might seem easy to dismiss because it is the first. But step back and think of all the things you have thought of doing or intended to do—but didn’t. None of those things made it to the Selfhost channel. They were just ideas. So, the Selfhost channel is your first successful “release” of something that you had a plan for and required effort to make it real.

While that release just is with yourself, some, if not many skills are used only with yourself, so don’t think that a release to the Selfhost channel is bad if it doesn’t go any further. For a lot of things, we learn it is all that it will ever go—and that’s ok. Remember, you put work into that skill, and even if you don’t ultimately use that skill and pivot to something else, that pivot wouldn’t have been identified unless you worked on this skill in the first place.

Selfhost is your place to evaluate. Is this something that would be useful? Is this something that others would benefit or value from? It starts to answer questions that will have that skill start to take shape and define its roadmap on where you will take it within the outer channels.

Up next

Start building comfort sharing your new skills with only those that you trust through your Canary channel.

Doug Winnie is the Chief Learning Officer at MentorNations a startup focused on fostering digital skills around the globe and Director of Learning Experience and Organizational Effectiveness at H&R Block. Doug previously worked in various digital skills, education and product management roles at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Adobe. Doug is also a LinkedIn Learning author with multiple courses on digital transformation, product management, and computer science. Doug is also the editor of the LinkedIn newsletter, “Digital Mindset” that publishes weekly on LinkedIn.