Keeping updated with the latest technologies.

Question

I am a software developer and I have been programming since the past six years. I simply love the mental challenge involved in trying to come up with solutions to hard problems, reading up programming literature, blogs by prominent developers and so on.

I work on Microsoft platform and I have trouble keeping up with the pace at which various frameworks are rolled out. Remoting,WCF,ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC, LINQ, WPF, WWF, OSLO, ADO.NET data services, DSL tools etc etc. Even understanding all these frameworks at an abstract level and see how they are all tied up with MS vision itself is a major hurdle. Now when you add other non microsoft technologies, programming languages etc to the equation, I wonder how do people manage?

Given that there are only 24 hours in a day, how does one keep himself updated about so many technology changes that happen everyday? My question is , is it even worth doing that?

The thing is, I am also interested in other fields such as literature, science. I try my best to at least gain a superficial understanding of what is happening in other fields of my interest and don't want to give up on that :)

Answer 1

Neo: "Blogs. Lots of Blogs."

With all of your focus on MSFT-Solutions, I'd suggest Channel9 interviews to see what's coming down the pipe in your neck of the woods.

Answer 2

For the Microsoft stack, I just read MSDN Magazine. If I find a topic interesting, then I read further.

Answer 3

Technology doesn't change that frequently. its the development kits or libraries that change. Try to keep yourself updated with technologies not sdk.

Answer 4

I would definitely go with the one-stop-shop for these things, which would be Dzone.

Answer 5

Read a lot, play a lot, and filter out something.
You can't simply know everything in detail; choose what you like most, and become an expert of that area.
For instance, Raymond Chen, as knowledgeable as he is about Windows, writes little or nothing about web applications. And the same applies to most of the blogs around: they write about a particular field, not about everything.

Answer 6

You'll never be able to learn it all. There's just too much and it changes too quickly. The important thing is to keep a pulse on what's new, upcoming and interesting. Understand the overarching concepts, then keep an eye for opportunities to take a deeper dive and learn more when the opportunity presents itself.

Here's an example of mine from a few years back....

For a while I'd been hearing about Ruby on Rails. I knew that it was a quick way to build database backed web applications, but since I had no immediate need to use it in my day to day work, I put off learning it for a while. I read a few high level articles and listened to podcasts discussing the stack, but I figured all the time and effort I put into a deeper learning of this technology would atrophy by the time I needed to use it for something job related and I'd need to relearn it anyway. I'd store interesting tidbits I picked up along the way as delicious bookmarks.

When the time came 6 months later to refactor a legacy database, I knew that it would be a good chance to try Rails Migrations and that it would help me quickly prototype and test changes (and different DB engines). For this job, it was the right tool. I had my learning resources in place and I was ready to take the deeper dive.

Most recently, after the StackOverflow podcast with Damien Katz, I'm talking a similar approach to CouchDB and Erlang. I know that those tools are there waiting for me to learn when I need to create a distributed system or am in need of a what Damien termed a "document store", but I view more as an object or tuple store.