What resources do you use to stay up to date in your domain?

Question

With all of us having only limited time and many of us not being programmers in their private life, I was wondering what would be the best approach to stay up to date in your field of work.

I realize that there are vast numbers of resources available to do so, but you can only consume a limited amount of them depending on how much time you are willing to invest.

I would be especially interested in opinions of people who are programmers for more than 10 years and how they managed to stay on top of the development of new frameworks, languages and techniques.

Do you read programming books, magazines, feeds or podcasts and which of those have the biggest use to you in terms of continuing education? How much time do you invest in personal development and do you do it as part of your work or in your spare-time?

Duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/201189/what-do-you-do-to-keep-learning

Answer 1

I answer questions on Stack Overflow.

If I run into a question that I don't know the answer to, but is clearly something I should know about (tools, APIs, etc. that I use) then I look it up.

Answer 2

PHP is my domain. And i hang on SO, read and partake in the the Official, Dev and QA mailing lists.

Answer 3

I've been programming for 20 years now. I join the discussion boards, like Stack Overflow. You don't have to participate, but read the questions and answers. Answer some if you can, especially the challenging ones. Think of them as pop quizzes to see how up to date your skills are.

Discussion boards are great, even if you don't know the subject matter since you find out what problems other people are encountering. Often there are posts and questions about frameworks you haven't heard of, or the answer shows techniques you didn't know about.

Go to presentations and seminars in your area. If only to learn someone else's opinion or techniques, which you may or may not agree with.

Podcasts I think are also great. Many colleges have their courses available on iTunes for free. I'm learning iPhone development now, but I am currently mainly a PHP programmer. I do find it easier to learn if you immerse yourself in a real project, even if it's your own.

Finally, I find O'Reilly bookshelf a very valuable asset for checking out books without actually buying them.

Answer 4

Having over 15 years of software development experience, I have seen a lot of change. To be honest, one of the best ways that I have found to keep up to date with things was to simply do it. When new projects come along where you work at make it known that you would like to work on them especially if they are using new technology like going from Visual Studio 6 to .NET.

I have also found that when I have changed jobs I had a great opportunity to update my skills to different if not new technologies. When I need to start working with something new say going from .NET to writing code in PHP, I first get a beginners book to learn the basics. From that point on I simply start doing it. If there are things that I need to do and can't figure out, there is always Google or StackOverflow.

You can ALWAYS ask someone too....

Rarely do I spend my personal time doing things like learning a new language. This is required for my job and I should be paid for that activity.

Answer 5

I spend a huge amount of time between these places:

• Stack Overflow
• Bytes
• MSDN Library
• O'Reilly's Safari
• Spend copious amounts on books [which my wife complains no end about]
• Project Euler
• Talk to colleagues about ideas for interesting projects
• Read technical blogs from other programmers
  • Jon Skeet
  • Marc Gravell
  • Joel Spolsky
  • Jeff Atwood
  • Daniel Moth
  • Mark Miller
  • Scott Guthrie
  • Scott Hanselman
  • Brad Abrams

I do have more blogs on my list, but if I list them all here, it'll take up the whole page...

Answer 6

I read technical blogs as those mentioned balabaster. Other that I also read are http://www.infoq.com/ and Monologue.

Finally nothing beats reading other people's code and trying out new stuffs. Whenever, I find an interesting open source project, I always look at the code, compile it, run it, and understand what others are doing.

Also getting your hand dirty, trying out the new MVC framework that comes out, or the latest beta, CTP, or whatever that's out there.

Answer 7

Depends on your journey to work, but for those who use the tube (where it is often too crowded to even read a paper), podcasts are great.

DotNetRocks and Hanselminutes.

Answer 8

I like this magazine because it has a sort of a visionary view on developments in IT in general, but also in very specific topics:

http://cacm.acm.org/