What is the best way to keep learning Splunk even if you are not working on it day in day out?

[macadminrohit]

Recently my project has changed which is totally different than what i have been doing (Splunking). But since i love Splunk so much i don't want to lose it as a skillset, considering the fact that it is one of the hottest technology out there. My question is to ask experts, what they recommend one of the best way to keep in touch with Splunk.

What I have been doing till now:
1) Installed Splunk N box on my macbook, and keep learning clustering stuff every other day.
2) Following the forum( answers.splunk.com)
3) Reading a book that I recently bought.

[skoelpin]

Yeah, defiantly don't want to lose the Splunk skills. You should do a side project of what interests you. If your into crypto, stocks, trading etc.. then you could start onboarding publicly available data from RSS feeds/API's and identify trends and perhaps make a quick buck off it. Do tons of side projects which you can showcase for future interviews!

[dsctm3]

Do tons of side projects <--- This x100.

I've always learned more when applying tools from the office at home. I've home-labbed throughout my career to figure out things I was interested in and/or just needed to know more about.

[skoelpin]

Exactly. If your company isn't giving you the keys to the kingdom then you need to create your own to stay relevant within the Splunk world

[macadminrohit]

Any ideas on the Side Project ?

[skoelpin]

Yeah I just gave 3 examples.. You need to first identify what you're interested in. Let's use my interests since I don't know yours.. I'm interested in stocks and trading. One of my side projects is identifying under valued stocks and correlating market sentiment to get bargain deals. You could even take this one step further and create an automated trading platform based off the logic you create.

[nickhills]

4.) Join Splunk Slack : http://splk.it/slack
5.) Keep up to date with the Splunk Blogs: https://www.splunk.com/blog