Newbie looking for guidance here - I feel like the more I learn, the more I realise what I don’t know and how much there is still to do. That’s not a problem per se, but it does get overwhelming sometimes.
Especially working from home during the last year, it wasn't always easy to feel connected to the outside world and find sources of inspiration. To get some new perspectives, I signed up to a number of newsletters, including Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, Chris Ashton's frequent11y (accessibility newsletter), JavaScript Weekly and Stefan Judis 'Web Weekly' (which I would strongly recommend!) - this was a good start, but it left me wondering how other developers handled this - How do you keep up to date with the latest developments? How do you sort out what’s worth looking into more thoroughly and what to skip over? What platforms or pages do you get your tech related news from?
Any tip, recommendation or perspective is highly appreciated :)
Top comments (40)
Don't waste your time.
98% of the time this is just a waste of time. If you are a React developer, make sure you don't miss the feature/changelog they upload on a release. You could even watch a video or two but that should be enough if there is a breaking change.
Podcasts, newsletters and hundred other things drain your brain's glucose reserves which is not good. This might make you mistake being busy with being productive. We've been using WebPack for years, same goes for React, Laravel or Express.js.
Thus, I don't get the point of being so focused and up to date on the latest hypes. Instead, opt for reading a good book which teach timeless lessons. Refactory, Design Patterns, The Pragmatic Programmer etc.
EDIT: I see you are a beginner, perhaps when you are a complete newbie, getting to know the development-scape is actually good. dev.to medium, youtube channels like Traversy Media, the one and only Colt Steele. Follow these in any form you like, that's what I did.
I can't agree more. I was trying to keep up with everything at the beginning of my career, and it was a mistake. Many trends are just old concepts with a different name. Now, I try to focus on the big ideas.
I've a blog where I try to describe timeless concepts. Hope it helps!
You simply nailed it.....Every blessed week , you see new tutorial on different things that will almost make you want to abandon your old stack. Focus is the key.
Simply to the point. 👌👌👌
Read books for understanding indepth and practice along.
New things will keep coming up. Build your solid foundation.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts - makes sense to not get too distracted with all the noise.
The newsletters are really great. What I do since years is watching twitter and follow them. What I also enjoy is reading dev.to posts. But of course there are is also a lot "bullshit" outside and I can imagine that espacially as beginner it's not easy to see which of all the new (or old) things is worthy to have a look.
First, it's never wrong to look into things and building your own opinion, no matter which level.
Second, find people you can talk openly about your opinion without getting blamed but learn why they disagree with your oppinion. That could be in your company and or team, a mentor or a community.
Third, as for it like you are doing here, this is also a really great way.
And last but not least, I always enjoyed (and still do) attending meetups and conferences. I got a lot of new input and had the oppurtunity to discuss things after or in between the talks.
Those are great tips, thanks a lot! I really like the idea of taking something I learned / read to discuss with somebody to get different perspectives :)
feel free to hit me up any time if you want to discuss something :)
I listen to podcasts. The thing I like most about listening is that I can do it while doing something else, like cleaning the kitchen. And it's easier to just listen than to read myself. I have a blogpost where I share my top 9 favorite podcasts , latley I also started listening to DevNews which I also recommend. :)
I love podcasts, thanks for sharing your list! The Ladybug podcast has been a favourite of mine for some time now, can't wait to give the others ones a listen :)
HackerNews primarily. I check it when compiling and put articles that seem interesting into Pocket for actual reading later. You can use Chrome's Read it later feature, but I like that Pocket syncs across my devices, personal and work.
The primary purpose of Pocket is so that I don't read things immediately. Instead, when I actually do sit down to read on the weekends or evenings, I ruthlessly delete anything that is no longer interesting or relevant by doing fast skims. Like, who's going to care about the Fastly outage in a week? It would be nice if Fastly published a decent post-mortem other than "pushed some bad code" So I can't learn from that => into Trash.
I also have a #someday tag for Pocket for articles or websites that will need a lot more time. At one point that someday tag was getting too much and a good part of quarantine for me was whittling it down.
I like that HackerNews, dev.to, and reddit all provide the ability to filter by "best of day/week/month/year" and I make heavy use of that as a way to filter out noise.
Thanks so much for sharing your process - more often than not I just push things into the 'read later' folder and never clean it up :D
Hackernews
If you notice that you know less than you initially assume is perfect, you are on the right track, when we start learning something the first stage is that you don't even know what you suck at in that field, so noticing that is a good mark of being in the next stage.
The first thing is to have the right mindset, learn to appreciate the feeling of not knowing something, because most of the time you will be in that place, so you need to feel comfortable and why not excited about the journey ahead of you.
Second, as you already do in programming, break the bigger problem into smaller problems, for example if you want to learn web development and you only know HTML, don't over look the whole roadmap, it's ok to go through it to make a general plan but don't think too much about how many things you don't know and treat that as one big entity, start with CSS, then JS, etc. one problem at a time.
And lastly, as you mention you need information on what's happening in the industry, newsletters, podcasts, looking here on dev.to and following people on github/twitter are great things, but in the end the important thing is to get your hands dirty, so for me the ideal scenario is to find a small/medium project that I want to do and try to apply the things I want to learn on that project, but always think if that piece of technology you're using actually solves a problem, not just because it's trendy.
Thanks for sharing this, I feel like a solution oriented approach will make it a lot easier to apply and understand abstract concepts in the long run!
I use feedly (feedly.com/) where I follow freecodecamp, dev.to and others... It let me have one place to manage all feeds that I like to read, when I have time all I do is I access to feedly and start reading.
Thanks for sharing - I didn't know this tool, will have a look :)
Newsletters are one of my main ways to keep up to date. Following a lot of devs on Twitter is my other big one.
I prefer the newsletters though because they are waiting for me in the inbox.
Besides that I'm also fortunate enough to work together with developers that share their most important findings with their colleagues.
One newsletter I can heavily suggest is by @cassidoo . It has news, humor and a challange every single time: cassidoo.co/
Amazing, thank you for sharing - signed up right away :)
The best way is: Don't. You don't have to learn every single new update. For web devs (It looks like you are one), old is better than new, because you get more browser support, etc.
That being said, don't just stop learning. Eventually you *will* have to learn stuff, because of 1. Curiosity or 2. Necessity. Also, once you are completely sure you have learned a topic, and have made a bunch of projects, You should learn something which complements whatever you have learned and makes it easier. (Don't learn a completely different thing which can't even work with what you already can use)
There are a lot of articles which give more info on this. Here's a list of them from the CSS-Tricks 2020 End of year thoughts (you should definitely read them all):
It's such a relieve that so many people here are taking off the pressure saying we definitely don't have to learn it all - thank you for sharing your thoughts and these articles! :)
As someone already said, the signal to noise ratio in most of the channels you will follow is going to be pretty bad. There's going to be a lot of BS filtering involved. Anyway, twitter is great, especially if you follow real people who do real work. I however prefer rss feeds. There's plenty of them and plenty of readers. I am currently using Inoreader as it's web based and I can easily use it from any of my devices and be in sync on all of them.
That sounds useful, I ll have a look into rss feeds - never used this before :)