How do you keep up?

I follow a lot of people from software communities on Twitter. A new trend always ends up in my timeline. I don't even try to keep up though. I read the introductory information to everything I see, and leave it at there if it's not gonna benefit me in the short run.

For example I follow Caleb Porzio since forever and heard about his new JS framework Alpine right away. I took a look and thought "yeah this is cool but I'm not gonna use it in the foreseeable future" and dropped it. Then I used Alpine in my latest product because it made sense.

Key point is to know about stuff, and not to master them.

Most of what I read about tech comes from Hacker News, that keeps me fairly current with the general state of things. For more specific things about tech I actually use, I sign up to several newsletters from Cooper Press: https://cooperpress.com/publications/ - I get one email a week per subscription, and it's usually very high signal-to-noise ratio.

Spend your early career (first 10 years), building your fundamentals. Focus on big ideas in programming (which are different from big ideas in computer science) as well as technologies that never go out of fashion (like text, unix, and http).

Once you have those down, not only will you learn new technologies faster, but you'll know what you don't need to learn.

Then pick a specialty that you believe to have long staying power but that you love, and become an expert in it. This will give you the beloved "T" shape that makes a strong developer. Usually this will be a language (ex. python) or technology (ex. unix).

I personally live this philosophy and have been very successful with it.
I did recently make the unusual decision to become an expert in engineering productivity (before I was considering python and unix) and recently started a blog to share my love of the topic: https://codefaster.substack.com

Stay focused on one language and ecosystem. Don’t try to keep up with all of software.

I work in Node/JS which happens to have a huge ecosystem.

I try to read broadly so I’m at least aware of what’s going on throughout the ecosystem. A few good newsletters will help you stay up to speed in the major developments.

I experiment by buildIng toy apps or hello worlds in a large-ish group of technology so I have light experience of how things work.

I do side-project with different tech than my day job to get production experience with other things.

And, beware of the shiny thing. Keeping up doesn't mean you migrate your stack every three months to whatever’s most popular.

At the end of the day, software exists to solve problems and bring value to the world. Keeping that in focus helps me be ok with not keeping up :)

As a developer all i can say that Constantly learning and grinding is a part of our job profile, so you have to always push yourself to try new thing, but it is totally okay to use whatever you know to build things quickly.
At the end of the day your visitors and customers do not care what technology is used in the behind, also i personally recommend sticking and learning a few core tech stacks and libraries which will help you take very far.
i am a huge fan of Boring club and use boring technologies to build anything new: http://boringtechnology.club/
hope this helps !

I don't.

I don't feel there is much "what's new". Frameworks are mostly the same. We use MVP for decades. Tools are mostly config, doesn't matter if it's JSON, YAML or edn. I focus on learning the basics in depth, and then I can adapt to whatever.

@juliogreff's answer is a good one - specifically Cooper Press newsletters. I think the right strategy is to not let yourself get distracted by shiny new things while you're focused on the current project, but newsletters do a great job of surfacing important developments. If you have a hard time staying focused, maybe stay off HN.

There will be a lot of peer pressure to follow various herds and at some moments people will proclaim the supremacy of certain technologies to be self-evident. As you progress from being a new developer to an intermediate developer (congrats on the first five years!) you'll now start observing that this industry moves in pendulum cycles and various ideas, personality types and agendas have a funny way of re-materializing.

As I approach my 7th five years, the most important thing I've learned is that there's always someone smarter than you, but everyone you meet has something to teach you.

No-one can know everything about IT, or anything for that matter. It's like trying to watch all youtube videos, it's impossible, they get added faster than anyone can watch them.

You can save yourself a big headache by not trying to stay up to date with everything.
Pick a few things you like and get into them. Expand when necessary.

A few days ago, I write an article posting and answering the same exact question.
Hope it helps you. I'd love to get your feedback
https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-stay-current-in-software-engineering-4170a453dafa?source=friends_link&sk=1f9e47b88a42a794f8323ad42c2242ed

You can build a scraper and scrape a variety of news & communities. Build filters for it to show relevant content. That's just a thought.

I'm still a bit new to this business but one thing I do know, as a developer you can make your life a lot easier!