How I keep up with tech?

Recently, I have been discussing about work with one of my employee. Suddenly he asked me a great question:

How do you keep up with ever-changing landscape of tech?

This is when it occurred to me that I should’ve had an answer to this question right? But I did not because it seems that I never paid attention or observed on my mechanisms to cop up with the technology.

Let’s dig in!

Why do we need to stay updated?

If you are anyway related to IT industry, I strongly believe that if you do not stay updated with what’s happening in the world, then this could be great disadvantage for the your career. Having said that we need to understand the dynamics of the IT industry.

IT being a very young industry has a lot to grow, we have yet to learn and adopt across multiple domains inside industry. Due to these reasons, the industry is constantly changing and evolving.

How do we stay updated?

Well, my go-to advise is to consume as much content as you can related to what you want to understand. This method generically applies to most probably everything that you are trying to learn. Remember, someone learns the most from the environment that he/she is living in. Having said that the best bet you can make to stay updated is to create an ever changing environment for yourself, consume all the latest content as much as possible.

Create constant environment of learning by consuming content as much as possible.

For example, if one is focusing on staying updated with the latests in JavaScript, I would highly suggest that one reads as much as possible about JavaScript, stay connected with communities on Slack or Discord or wherever they are, subscribe and listen to podcasts of such technologies. This creates an environment of learning around you, trust me you will constantly learn something new everyday.

What do I follow?

Let me write down list of things I follow across various sites (in no particular order):

1. Podcasts

• JS Party - Keeps you up-to date on JS World.
• Go Time - Very interesting guests and conversations around Golang
• Grafana’s Big Tent - If you’re interested to learn how Grafana’s changing observability space.
• Ship It! - Interesting discussions in infrastructure space.
• Developer Tea - Small byte-sized guides to improve yourself.

2. Blogs

• Software Engineering Daily - Some very interesting reads.
• The Pragmatic Engineer - Interesting writes around software engineering.
• Netflix Tech Blog - Read about their system’s architecture
• Engineering at Meta - Learn about behind the scenes on most Meta products. Some interesting AI articles as well.
• AWS Architect - Read about latest offerings and best practices about AWS.
• Github Engineering - Learn about some interesting challenges inside Github.
• Dropbox Tech - Read some interesting Security & ML articles.
• Zomato Tech Blog - Read how they are scaling their services to meet the demands.
• Zerodha Tech - How biggest broker in India operates it’s tech.
• Hotstar Blog - How they scale to millions of user.

Closing thoughts

To sum up the whole article, I believe one should keep one’s self updated with ever changing technological landscape by creating an environment of constant content consumption. However, it is equally crucial to ensure you are consuming higher quality content through which you are actually learning & understanding the changes coming.

Thank you for reading!