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Felix Vo
Felix Vo

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How do you stay up to date as a Software Engineer

As a developer, stay up to date is really important. But how can we survive in the world of tech, which rapidly changes over and over?

I personally follow these blogs to keep updated
https://medium.com
http://dev.to
https://blog.codinghorror.com/
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/
https://www.reddit.com/
...

I bought a Kindle last year, so every time I found an interesting blog/article I send it to my kindle to read it later. This way works quite well and I'm happy with it.
But after years, my list keeps growing and it's taken me hours just to go through the list and check for anything new.
Also, my Kindle reading list becomes unmanageable with more than 350 articles.
You know Kindle good for reading but suck for managing contents.

So I need to find a better way, after days of searching I end up with this combination:

Feedly + Pocket + P2K + Kindle = ❤️

Feedly - organize, read and share what matters to you

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So now I can check all the news in just one place, yeah RSS is undead
I try to keep my list as short as possible, you don't need to know everything in the tech's world. Actually, you can't and you shouldn't

Many places don't offer RSS like your DEV weekly newsletter emails or DEV digest of top posts from my tags.
Have you ever feel your inbox is full of daily/weekly newsletter?
There is a service can turn your email into RSS call Kill The Newsletter

Pocket

I use Pocket to manage my reading list, and P2K to schedule send articles to my Kindle every week, so I can read in the weekends
I also have a simple tagging map to help me organize the articles better, so I can easily find what I want

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Top comments (11)

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

It is indeed difficult to keep up with everything changing in tech. Things change so fast. Similar to you Felix I read, every day. At the very least 1 hour per day is dedicated to reading and staying current with target technologies. Then, once a week or so, spend an hour discovering new tools and tech.

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miniscruff profile image
miniscruff

Typically I just read a few headlines here and there from what I get from my phone. The Google feed stuff. I wait until it comes time to make a decision and research then. Like starting a new app or when we need to move in a new direction.

Too much noise on tech news to be worth my time.

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charbelsako profile image
Charbel Sarkis

Big fan of one piece here

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felixvo profile image
Felix Vo

new dev article 😩
new one piece chapter 😏
lol

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jared profile image
Jared

Big fan of Pocket to manage reading lists.

Starting using gettoby.com/ as well within the last couple months. Love it. Allows me to quickly inventory resources when I'm researching something and come back to it later (rather than leave the browser open with 20+ tabs).

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bellonedavide profile image
Davide Bellone

I do something similar, except for the Kindle. In fact, I have a Kobo.

The main problem with it is that all the code embedded from GitHub, Gists etc cannot be shown, since they are not "static" text content. So most of the articles are kinda useless.

And that's why when I write an article I use plain Markdown and I don't include Gists or similar.

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felixvo profile image
Felix Vo

yes, I tried multiple tools like epub.press/ still the same 😭

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adron profile image
Adron Hall

I wrote about exactly this about ~6 months ago here > compositecode.blog/2019/07/11/the-...

However, I've actually narrowed that down to just a little tweeting and dev.to, and otherwise I'm in the code every single day. I barely have time to keep up with anything as of late on account of shipping code. 😞

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damjand profile image
Damjan Dimitrov

Thanks for the suggestion! I just tried Feedly and it feels like it's the only thing I need for managing articles to read, it's amazing!

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aelafnstein profile image
Aelaf

Hey Felix, there is android app named Readably (@readablyapp) got awesome rss experience works decently even in weak connection. both free and premium version

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optiklab profile image
Anton Yarkov

I use app.raindrop.io/ as a long live storage for articles in addition to pocket, which is used as a short live storage.