Stay updated in JS fatigue universe
Keeping up to date with what’s going on has become an exhausting task these days.
It seems that quitting the race for only a few months months will result in your skill set becoming obsolete, or lost in a sea of new hypes, libraries and frameworks.
Many of my colleagues wonder how do I manage to stay up to date and still accomplish my daily tasks.
In this post I will share my daily routine and show you how to find useful sources of information.
Who to follow
Many of my sources come from Twitter. Following the leaders of the JavaScript community lets me pick up very interesting stuff. Although finding these people can be a conundrum.
As we are mostly concerned with the open source community, GitHub is my primary source. Clicking on the “Contributors” tab of a leading repository allows me to check out the profile of these leading contributors. Some of them have Twitter accounts, in which they post valuable information.
Exploring new projects
Another huge source of information, is GitHub’s “Explore” tab. You can spend days-upon-days there, with its endless source of topics, recommendations and, my favorite, trends.
Going to https://github.com/trending will present the latest trending repositories and developers. You can also filter them based on languages and time span (today, this week, this month).
News sites
My daily routine includes two news sites, following the hacker news style. I like them because they are spam free and all of their content is from the community.
EchoJS — https://www.echojs.com/
Front-End Front — https://frontendfront.com/
When do you have the time?
During our work hours we are too busy delivering. When returning to our homes we are often too tired to digest work-related information.
Personally I don’t believe that you should do this outside work hours. This is also very bad practice according to time management philosophy. In my opinion you should enrich your core during work time.
So upon arrival to work I start with going thru the news websites. If I find something interesting I bookmark it for later read (I’m using Refind for that).
We are not machines, and our work usually includes some “dead” minutes. Even if it doesn’t, I dedicate half an hour a day to read some of the bookmarked links.
Before I go home, I briefly browse github’s “trending” and star the repositories that capture my eyes. I will review them in my 30 dedicated minutes, or will use some of them in my next POC or even project at work.
Contributing
Contributing can be a great source of information and also let you the ability to use some hands-on and practice what you’ve learned.
Asking questions on Stack Overflow, answering them, opening issues at GitHub, submitting pull requests and participating in discussion groups will be a benefit to your knowledge and skills.
I would love to here your thoughts and will be happy to answer your questions.
