On keeping yourself up-to-date
You can learn something new when you need it, but you need to learn how to search effectively high quality, pertinent knowledge before. It is not always possible to spend much time at the very least moment, so is better investing on your curiosity.
This is how I do it:
- something new (for me)/unusual/interesting/useful catch my attention, i.e. it passes trough my bullshit/hype filter (developing and improving it is an art in itself);
- I try to familiarize myself with the vocabulary of the field (Wikipedia is generally useful as a starting point, but never assume correctness and/or completeness);
- I search for basic material first, to catch early an eventual slip in my filter: introductions, overviews, surveys, comparisons, ...
- than I search for specific key terms/phrases to retrieve relevant literature - CiteSeer and a generic search engine are usually enough.
- I read abstracts of found material and select those that seems more interesting.
Last but not least, it is a general good advice to stay away from the last magnificent "technologies" much hyped commercially. In this regard I wholeheartedly recommend reading an article by one of our hosts: Fire and Motion. Here a relevant excerpt:
... When I was an Israeli paratrooper a
general stopped by to give us a little
speech about strategy. In infantry
battles, he told us, there is only one
strategy: Fire and Motion. You move
towards the enemy while firing your
weapon. The firing forces him to keep
his head down so he can't fire at you.
(That's what the soldiers mean when
they shout "cover me." It means, "fire
at our enemy so he has to duck and
can't fire at me while I run across
this street, here." It works.) The
motion allows you to conquer territory
and get closer to your enemy, where
your shots are much more likely to hit
their target. If you're not moving,
the enemy gets to decide what happens,
which is not a good thing. If you're
not firing, the enemy will fire at
you, pinning you down. ...
Mind you, I'm not a fan-boy of Joel Spolsky, sometimes I violently disagree with his opinions, but this article can be really an eye-opener for much of the "naive" mass of programmers, from someone that worked at Microsoft for years. This is not an anti-Microsoft rant either, this strategy is not unique to Microsoft, it is the most important characterization of how this "industry" functions - most affected targets are you, the poor programmer, small-to-medium ISVs and users (big firms usually have enough resources to fight on the same ground).
Suggestions/tips/tricks on improvements/corrections of this process welcomed.
P.S.: Fravia(RIP)'s web searching lore is an interesting site for learning to search effectively on the web.
Well, I'd like to retort: how much great is the risk of finding yourself blown away by a disruptive technology?