How does a programmer remain up to date?
I don’t mean with just a specific language; I’m talking about new technologies. For example, how would one know to switch over from ADO.Net to ORM? Or that the future of Silverlight looks dim in the impending light of HTML5? Or that ASP.Net Web Forms is being replaced by MVC?
How would an older-generation programmer realize that people use OOP rather than procedural programming? Or that agile has become the new way to develop?
Sure, there are plenty of ways to figure out any of the above; but is there any single place one can plug into and simply remain informed about everything?
I found a similar question here, but I don’t feel like I found the answer I am looking for.
Note: The internet is full of places that can help one remain up to date. The problem is that these places are mostly helpful if one already knows what to look for. I’m looking for a place that will inform of updates in directions I wouldn’t normally consider (among other things).
I keep up with new technology/dev approaches using a combination of services/tools that do the work for me while I am actually at work or sleeping. It’s all about leveraging the various services out there and making it as non-intrusive as possible. At least that’s my best approach. There is no silver bullet for what you are asking, though. The beauty of the internet is that there is no ‘magic directory’ out there and resources tend to be organic and evolve.
I will namedrop some services I use to make this easier, but I’m not plugging them or saying you shouldn’t use some alternative. These things just work for me.
First thing I rely on is my Google Reader account and subscribe to a large number of RSS feeds/blogs and I’m sure to categorize the RSS feed appropriately to make it easier for me when i actually glance through the feed every week or two. Outside of the ‘big name’ developers, I stumble across various blogs when searching for a technical question and most of the time I will subscribe to the feed. If the content is not good, I just dump it a few months later. I have categories setup in Google Reader like ‘ASP.NET MVC’, ‘Ruby’, ‘Microsoft Dev’, ‘Node.js’, etc. If a blog overlaps, I will add it to multiple categories. Just makes life easier in contrast to having 50 feeds all in the same bucket. I read my RSS either in the browser on Google or use ‘Reader’, an app for iOS.
I also lurk on Twitter a lot and follow a large number of developers across various technology stacks. Combined with a tool/service like Instapaper (http://instapaper.com) (there are alternatives, but I have used Instapaper for a while now), I can add a link that sounds interesting from twitter and check it out when I have time.
Finally, I have a pinboard (http://pinboard.in) account which is just a bookmark site. Again, there are tons of alternatives here. I have my pinboard account setup to automatically bookmark anything I added to Instapaper each night as well as grab bookmarks/links from certain twitter feeds that are always pushing out good content.
I also have a Safari Books Online account and check out newly added books on certain topics each week. If I glance at it and think it needs further reading after 5-10 minutes, I will favorite the book and look it over at a later time.
In all honesty, I maybe look at this stuff once a week max. But when I do have the time, at least I can find items I would have normally missed and more often than not I find an excellent blog post on something I’m dealing with at work. A blog post I probably would have never found.