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Just wondering how everyone keeps up with it. I mainly work with ASP.NET and Windows form, but I'm stuck using 3.0 for business reasons. So most of my self education is on my own time (weekends, which I like to do game programming, so I only have 3-5 hours a week to learn something new)
How do you keep up with the never ending supply of new content?
IMHO programmers put too much emphasis on the latest technologies. It's important to have heard of them so you know what to look up when necessary. However, the latest technologies change so fast that it's not worth learning about them in any detail unless/untill you actually need to use them. Instead, focus most of your learning efforts on the fundamentals.
Experiment constantly
Reading is good, but it's no substitute for doing. If you read about something that you find interesting, say, Mercurial as a version control system then go off and attempt to use it in a project at home.
If it's a total headache to get it working to your satisfaction then you can reasonably expect the idea to wither and die, if not (like Mercurial which is a breeze) then it's likely to gain traction and you're up on the game.
Try to pick technologies and approaches that augment what you're trying to do on a daily basis. For example, Spring Roo shows promise as a rapid application development tool.
Remember that anything you learn typically has a half-life of 18 months so don't keep your knowledge to yourself.
Reading all the time. I get a pretty good dose of .Net and related technologies just by working in it every day, so most of my off hours reading is in completely unrelated technologies. The hardest part is the desire to master everything. You just can't. So, you pick your technologies based on what is applicable to your current work or what you simply have a strong interest in and accept that just having a passing knowledge of the rest is OK.
My goal is to be a jack of most trades, master of some.
ETA : I have a long list of blogs that I read, that I've collected over the years by finding a blog that interest me and then using their blog roll or links to other blogs to find new ones. You follow that practice long enough you'll find some really great reading.
Since there's an infinite amount of information for us to learn, it all comes down to determining the trade-off between time and the outcome (of spending the time to learn new concepts).
To discern what is worthwhile is a valuable skill that most of us are continuously striving to achieve. A simple starting point would be following blog posts by renowned people in the target field. I find that checking the popular questions on SO gives me great results in a short amount of time. Anything that I feel should be delved into further would be followed up by copious amounts of Googling.
I tend to practice just-in-time learning. I apply the YAGNI principle to new technologies. At this point, there has to be a valid business case for learning a new technology. There are only 24 hours in a day, and I need to make the best use of my time.
READ!
Find any sources you can to read constantly. When new technologies are mentioned that you don't know about, go and research those specifically. Sites like this are great because there are such a wide range of people on here who are constantly mentioning different technologies. Other sources could be technology news feeds, programming magazines, conferences, etc.
EDIT: I guess I never explained why completely. I think this is the best approach because it allows you to get exposed very quickly (and for free most of the time) to lots of different technologies. Then you can briefly review those technologies for a general idea of what they're about before actually investing huge amounts of time learning them. Not all technologies will be of interest/use to you so this allows you to filter fairly effectively IMO what you'll invest time in and what you won't.
There are several ways I stay always bombarded with information:
This 5 steps will keep you fresh and give you a huge amount of info! :)
I subscribe to Wired UK Magazine, read blogs, buy new books, listen to Podcasts, participate on forums.
Sometimes it feels like losing battle, but just keep going.
When I get a chance, code up a small project using the language fad of the decade.
I wrote a UI simulator for an embedded device in Java to become more proficient in Java.
My current assignment is to write an application using C# to talk to a test fixture.
I've also dabbled a bit with HTML and my own website.
I still have yet to learn Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, Objective C, etc...
Don't worry about fad languages. Become more skilled at your fundamental computer languages and learn the fad languages as you have time or get paid opportunities to do so.
I generally follow-up on screen casts from conferences. You can always find relevant discussions on new langue features, tools, frameworks or other technologies, depending what the conference revolves around. This can give you some great insights into the new: the basic philosophy and the premise for the problem it addresses. This is like nurturing your panoramic view from the plateau.
If I'm familiar with a certain technology and have used it in the past, even briefly, I generally subscribe to the release notes, just to keep tabs on the latest events.
Afterwards, I'm with @Jonathan Khoo on the matter. I pay attention to new tags that pop-up on SO, since this is the most accessible way to recognize new trends in the developer community.
I mainly read up on technical news blogs. I especially like http://www.techmeme.com since it's an aggregator. If I then hear something interesting on there, like a new technology or language, etc. for example "adobe wallaby" I'll go and google and learn more about it.
Also every once in awhile I'll create a side project in a new language or technology. I'm a .NET developer by trade, but I've recently dabbled with iOS programming. And now things are pointing heavily to HTML5 so I'm going to look towards that.
