Keep Yourself Up-to-Date with the Latest Tech Stuff
Do you know it when somebody tosses around a name of some nichey technology and there’s that person who (surprisingly) appears to be familiar with it?
Well, for some unexplained reason, there’s a lot of stuff I’m familiar with even though I don’t necessarily have to. I even have one friend who always jokes about how I know just any insignificant library in existence.
Seriously now, this has a reason. That’s because I’m always trying to keep myself up-to-date with the latest stuff out there. I strongly believe that being a good professional requires constant learning and improvement (and yes, I know it might sound a bit obvious or even pompous). I don’t mean you have to maintain a high level of knowledge about everything, but you should at least be familiar with stuff, so you can know what everybody is talking about and not ignore because it has nothing to do with your domain.
Over the time, I’ve collected various information sources of many types: newsletters, blogs, GitHub accounts, etc. I’m writing this post to share this knowledge, hoping it will help someone at some point.
Subscribe to Newsletters and Read Blogs
Blogs can be very informative, from personal blogs to companies’ engineering blogs (Google, JetBrains, Wix — you name it, they probably have one). Newsletters are also a good way to get interesting news about stuff you like. Whether it’s a product you enthusiastically use or a blog you follow, many publishers also have a weekly/monthly newsletter.
Follow Interesting People
Find professionals whose work you appreciate (or even better, those serious guys you look up to) and follow them. It can be on GitHub, their blog, Twitter or whatever medium they publish interesting stuff on.
Maintain a Reading List
Dozens of interesting articles are published every day. You can never read all of them immediately.
I recommend maintaining a reading list: when you encounter an interesting article or post which you can’t read there and then, save it to your list. You can use Pocket, Evernote, a simple checkbox-list or whatever that works for you.
Over the years, I have developed pipelines for maintaining my reading list. I currently use Pocket to save articles (both on desktop and mobile), then I have a utility that runs every 10 minutes and transforms any newly-saved article into a card in my reading board on Trello.
The latter has some columns to help me manage reading order and status.
Expand your Information Circles
Subscribing to one monthly newsletter is not enough. Always keep adding new information sources to your input stream, whether it’s a regional Facebook group about your domain, a blog or GitHub page referenced from another blog you read, or any other.
Go to the real world: there are plenty of meetups about almost any field. Get out and visit them. Not only you’re likely to learn something new, you’ll also find more knowledge circles (sounds recursive, huh?) and meet new people.
Where do I start?
If you’ve reached here, you must be wondering how and where to find your initial information sources. It depends on what you are interested in, but generally you can google for “blogs/podcasts about <whatever you want>” and try to find what looks interesting and valuable for you. Anyway, here are some recommendations, most of which are not focused in a specific domain:
Newsletters
- (Hebrew) ToCode Newsletter - a monthly newsletter with news and interesting stuff about software development
- (English) JetBrains Monthly Newsletters
- (English) GitHub Daily/Weekly/Monthly Newsletter (scroll down a bit to choose one and subscribe)
- Find more here
Blogs
- (Hebrew) toCode — Ynon Perek’s blog
- (Hebrew) Internet Israel — Ran Bar-Zik’s blog, mostly about web development and security
Telegram Blogs
- (Hebrew) “שיט טכנולוגי” (Technologic Shit)
Podcasts
- (Hebrew) “רברס עם פלטפורמה” (Reversim), specifically the sub-podcast “Bumpers”
My apologies for the fact that many of the recommended sources are for Hebrew speakers only. The discussed concepts apply to any language 😄
Finding interesting people to follow is more tricky. The best tip I can give is noticing the names mentioned in whatever you read or listen to. If some name is repeated a few times, it’s probably worth a peek.
To summarize, I cannot really recommend you for your specific domain of interest, but I hope this post helped you find your entry points. From this point you can go on all by yourself :)
Thanks to Jenia Galperin, Meir Halachmi and Dor S for the feedback on the draft of this post.
